Language Council Steals Page from PQ Playbook
Published by Cynthia Turpin on 2010-03-08
by DON MACPHERSON
Lucky French-speaking Quebecers, to have not just a council but a superior one, to offer advice to the government on how to protect their language against threats, albeit exaggerated ones.
And understatement is not to be expected from a body that must live up to the name given it by a former Parti Québécois government: the Conseil supérieur de la langue française, to distinguish it from all the lower councils of the French language. The name makes one think of powdered wigs.
So, in its advice (snipurl.com/ungrs) to the Charest government on how to respond to last November's Supreme Court ruling striking down Bill 104, the higher council takes 55 pages to say what it could have said in two words: "we concur."
The council was concurring with the PQ, though you will not find the latter's name anywhere in those 55 pages, which provide non-partisan cover for a proposal the PQ picked up from two academics who originally made it.
The proposal is to extend to fully private English schools the restrictions on admission to publicly funded ones. This would close a loophole that allowed parents to buy their children's way around the restrictions for the price of a single child's tuition at an unsubsidized English school for a few years or less.
In principle, it's hard to justify allowing the purchase of a right by those who have the means to afford it while denying it to those who don't.
Also, the proposal would avoid the compound headache, political as well as administrative, of assessing each child's commitment to an English education, as suggested by the Supreme Court.
It was the annual traumatization of 5-year-olds with the Bourassa government's English tests in the 1970s that led to the introduction of the restrictions in the first place.
And the PQ has said the proposal could be shielded from court challenges by invoking the notwithstanding override clause in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
But the right to attend English school might not be the only right involved here.
There's also "the prior right (of parents) to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children," as recognized by the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
The declaration is not legally binding, but denying parents' the right to choose a fully private education in English for their children might be a violation of its spirit.
And restricting admission to private English schools would create a precedent for other interference with private education.
Then there is the question of whether the ends justify the means.
The council concludes that they do - but only after exaggerating the threat to French represented by the losses to English schools.
It cites only a single demographic analysis, delivered last November at a "seminar" held by an "institute" formed by pro-French-language hawks. According to the analysis, as many as 20 per cent of pupils in English schools might have taken advantage of the loophole.
The council doesn't mention that this figure is disputed; the English school boards say it's less than one-quarter as many. The council doesn't mention that even if the figure were accurate, it still represents a loss by the French schools of only two per cent of their pupils at most, because of the disparity in enrollment between the French and English systems.
Nor does it mention that the French schools might actually gain more pupils who are eligible to attend English schools but go to French schools instead than they lose through the loophole.
The council acknowledges anglophone concerns about the vitality of the English-language school system, but pays them only fleeting lip service.
Then again, it's the higher council of the French language, not English. Anglophones, to defend their interests, have only Jean Charest.
dmacpher@thegazette.canwest.com
