Obey the language market

National Post Tuesday, March 12, 2002

Éditorial - Quebec City's first English-language private school will open this fall. More than 200 students have already been enrolled -- even though the school began accepting applications only this past weekend. Such heavy demand comes as a surprise to many. Quebec's language law forces all public school students to attend French-language schools unless at least one of their parents was educated in English somewhere in Canada. English schooling was thought to be an industry in decline.

Indeed, in the 15 years after Bill 101 was enacted in 1976, enrolment at English-language schools fell by more than 40%. But in recent years, applications to English-language private school have gone up, as have requests for exemptions from French-language public school requirements. No doubt, enrolment would rise faster still if the province's separatist government would relax the enrolment rules and provide English schools with a fair level of funding. Up to two-thirds of Quebecers, including nearly 50% of francophones, tell pollsters they favour doing away with their provincial government's high-handed regulations aimed at preserving French language and culture.

The Parti Québécois may view language and culture as specimens that must be kept under glass. Yet it is clear parents -- especially francophone parents -- take a more practical view. The current generation does not fear that their Québécois culture will be destroyed if their offspring learn both French and English. They also know that their children will need more than a passing familiarity with English if they are to succeed in a globalized economy. Indeed, the operators of Quebec City's new English-language private school were urged to set up in the provincial capital not by English-speaking parents, but rather by French. These parents seek to do what many of their professional and upper-middle-class counterparts are already doing in the rest of the country: immerse their children in the other official language in hopes they will become fully bilingual.

Private schools are exempt from Quebec's language regulations because they receive no provincial funding. Yet with tuitions in the range of $7,000 to $15,000 a year, they are also out of the reach of most working parents. Both Jacques Parizeau and Lucien Bouchard, the two most-recent past premiers of Quebec, sent their children to pricey English-instruction private schools. But what of less affluent parents?

A handful of individual families and groups of families have law suits currently before Quebec's courts, seeking an end to the restrictive public school language laws. Such a path is costly and slow, however. And there is little reason to hope these suits will be successful; the first decisions have mostly gone against free-choice parents. The government, moreover, is fighting parental choice tooth and nail. Just yesterday, Quebec's Education Minister announced he wants to plug a loophole in the system that permits some immigrant and francophone children to attend English public schools.

Instead, with a provincial election drawing closer, parents desirous of language choice in Quebec's public schools should put pressure on the opposition Liberals to promise open-language school vouchers if elected. If parents were able to direct the public funds earmarked for their children's education to the school of their choosing, the appropriate level of French- and English-language schooling would soon become obvious -- and every child would get the learning opportunities that the PQ's top brass seek for their own.