We are all trying to make sense of a situation that just doesn’t seem to make sense. We are doing our best to make sure everyone knows we support the protection of the French minority within Canada just as long as it does not mean squashing the English minority within Quebec. And we are all trying to keep our cool amid what feels very much like discrimination against the English minority within Quebec.
But some days, it ain’t easy.
And this is not just about the rights of the English minority. This is about human rights. This is about whether our government sees all citizens as equal and prohibits any discrimination between segments of society, whether based on language, religion, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, the clothes we wear or any number of ways in which people can be put into different categories. It is about whether any of us, whatever language we speak or faith we follow, accepts the rule of a government that is willing to treat some people as second-class citizens with fewer rights than others.
Fortunately, not everyone does. The Task Force on Linguistic Policy’s legal challenge to the CAQ government’s language law, reported in last week’s paper, is but the most recent of several formal expressions of dissent. But what continues to be not merely conspicuous but shocking by its absence is any intervention by the federal government.
And if its silence on the matter isn’t bad enough, it will only add insult to injury with its imminent passage of federal Bill C-13. Among its many shortcomings, Bill C-13 formally cites Quebec’s Bill 96, the source of the amendments to Quebec’s language policy that required CAQ’s invocation of the notwithstanding class to protect it from challenges under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Yet, also as we reported last week, our own MP believes her party’s Bill C-13 will be good for francophones and anglophones alike.
At the federal level, the Liberals are not alone in their apparent indifference to the unsettling human rights implications of Bill 96. No federal parties appear to have any problem with what is happening to minorities within Quebec during their time in office, selling us down the river, from Ottawa, past Montreal and on to Quebec City. It is a matter of speculation that none of them wants to be the one that gives CAQ cause to shapeshift into an out-and-out separatist party that parlays a “provocation” from Ottawa into a movement that would see Quebec leave the Canadian confederation once and for all.
And that is how authoritarianism works. In the schoolyard, fear of what the bully might do is usually enough to achieve widespread acquiescence. In politics, scapegoating a minority to consolidate a political base is a tried-and-true method of securing power, with many egregious examples throughout modern history, many with catastrophic outcomes.
This is not a remotely sustainable path for society. Anyone with an aspiration to raise their children in the peace that comes from equal access to the benefits society can offer must recognize the current threat to that possibility.
Charles Dickson
