Chris Selley: Quebec cannot afford this anti-anglo decadence

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Among several live linguistic issues in the ongoing Quebec election campaign, the one that seemed to make the biggest dent in anglophone media in recent days was Élections Québec’s announcement that it would only distribute printed election materials, including voter information cards, in French. This is in deference to Bill 96, Quebec’s latest decadent attack on minority-language rights. Among other great democratic feats, the law divides Quebec’s anglophones into those with “acquired rights” to English-language services who have roots in the province, and more recent arrivals who have no language rights.

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Quick tangent here: Radio-Canada reported Friday that sales in adult diapers now exceed sales in baby diapers in Quebec. Twenty years ago, there were 36 per cent more births than deaths in Quebec, according to official government statistics. In 2024, there were three per cent more deaths than births. Does that sound like a society that can afford to pick and choose immigrants?

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Anyway, Élections Québec asked for an exemption from the law to provide bilingual material to voters. “For us, the right to vote is … fundamental,” Élections Québec spokesperson Julie St-Arnaud Drolet told CTV News. Both the minister and the commissioner responsible for the French language turned them down.

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It is petty, pointless, and not the end of the world. The French-language versions come with a QR code that points you to the English-language instructions. (Only certain anglos are entitled to printed elections information, but apparently online is a mad free-for-all.)

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But as St-Arnaud says, voting is as fundamental a right as there is. It’s the last thing we should be meddling with for squeaks and giggles. Reasonable people can disagree on ID requirements and such, but unlike a lot of systems in Canada, while very far from perfect, our relatively low-tech elections usually work within acceptable parameters (if not always to newspaper deadlines).

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The unilingual voter cards weren’t nearly the pettiest or most disquieting language development on the campaign trail last week, though. That honour goes, not for the first time, to Parti Québécois leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon. And I feel like this got less notice.

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“Under the leadership of the CAQ and Christine Fréchette, every indicator related to the French language has declined,” a PQ press release averred. Among the indicators listed were “mother tongue” and “language spoken at home.”

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PSPP is quoted in the release: “In Montreal, the situation is simply catastrophic. Less than half of Montrealers speak French at home.”

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Nationalist campaigns have long begged to be asked what Gazette columnist Don Macpherson asked of the PQ way back in 2012: “How are you supposed to change your mother tongue?” It’s a clear tell, as Macpherson said, that for the PQ, “the problem is not one of behaviour, but of identity.”

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And “none of your goddamn business if I can and do speak French” is a very fine response to “what language do you speak at home?” But it’s not true, for the record, that less than half of Montrealers speak French at home.