Happy Birthday, Bonnie Chance
Fireworks blossomed and flags rippled in Ottawa last week, as 23 million Canadians—or most of them, anyway —cheered the 110th anniversary of their national confederation. The $3.5 million birthday bash was a big change from last year, when merrymaking funds were slashed abruptly by an austerity-minded government. This time the question of national unity overrode any urge for thrift. Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau was determined to show that Canadians want to stick together as a nation despite the election victory of the separatist Parti Québécois last November in Quebec, his country's largest province. Said Trudeau in his Dominion Day address: "The sort of bickering which has too often been characteristic of Canadian life is giving way to a renewed willingness to open our hearts and minds to each other."
Big Trouble. Demonstrating that hearts and minds policy, some days earlier Trudeau put in an appearance in Quebec at the annual holiday honoring St. Jean Baptiste, the province's patron saint. There, Quebec Premier René Lévesque also happens to be making big trouble for Trudeau on the most explosive issue in officially bilingual Canada: language rights. A fundamental goal of Lévesque's party is that Quebec "will be the country of a people that speaks French." Stripped of secessionist overtones, that aim makes great sense to many of the 4.8 million French-speaking Quebeckers, who fear that their language and culture are gradually being overwhelmed on their home ground by English. Thus Lévesque has embarked on a drastic program to legislate the language of everyday life in Quebec — meaning parlez français for everyone.
His proposed language law has outraged the 1.2 million non-French Quebeckers, most of whom are English-speaking. Trudeau's government sympathizes with Lévesque's aim of preserving French, but fears that the bill is only a first step toward the Premier's avowed goal of separating Quebec from the other nine Canadian provinces.
The proposed new law would make French the only "official" language in Quebec. In effect, that would mean that all business with the provincial government would have to be conducted in French, and all professionals, like doctors and lawyers, would have to display "appropriate" fluency to obtain licenses to practice. Corporations, traditionally dominated by Quebec's English-speaking elite, would be monitored by a government board to ensure that French became their "language of work." One section of the bill would even forbid the sale of toys or games requiring "use of a non-French vocabulary for their operation" unless a French-language version was available as well.
The most hotly debated proposals concern the public education system. If Lévesque has his way, all new residents of Quebec must send their children to French-language schools, unless at least one parent attended English-language elementary school in the province. The rationale: nine out of ten non-French-speaking immigrants to Quebec now choose English-language schooling for their children—a trend that threatens the long-term survival of French as the province's principal language.