Keeping the peace

When language minister Diane Lemieux picked up the papers yesterday, she must have been pleased.

It was not that she had made front-page headlines with the language legislation she had introduced the day before. Rather, it was that she hadn't; the province's major dailies, except for this one, had stuffed the story inside.

After the epic debates over bills numbered 63, 22, 101, 178 and 86, the introduction of language legislation has become a non-story in Quebec.

In our business, good news is no news. And the good news in Lemieux's legislation for the vast majority of people in Quebec is that it contains nothing likely to disturb a linguistic peace they don't want disturbed.

Keeping the peace was the point of the whole exercise that began two years ago, when the government promised the Parti Québécois hawks an overhaul of language policy in return for a big, ego-stroking vote of confidence for former premier Lucien Bouchard at the last PQ convention.

Even as the government followed up on that promise by creating the Larose estates-general commission, it already realized a couple of things about language in Quebec that are faithfully reflected in Lemieux's bill.

One is that, as the Larose commission said in its report, Quebec has reached the practical limits of what legislation can effectively do to promote and protect the French language. The other is that 34 years after the Saint-Léonard school riots, we have established a consensus on language with which most of us, including most members of the PQ, can live, if not entirely happily.

And so Lemieux's language bill is a minimalist one that changes as little as possible, containing less than what the Larose commission and even the PQ's official language policy proposed, and much less than what the PQ's language hawks had wanted.

It would even take away a sop to the hawks the government gave in 1996 when it restored the Commission de la Protection de la Langue Française, the linguistic Taliban known for the zeal with which it enforces its literal interpretation of regulations.

The government hopes that bringing the language watchdog to heel under the control of an umbrella agency will restrict its freedom to commit "errors of judgment" that embarrass Quebec abroad and bring the French Language Charter into disrepute at home.

Such minor tweaks to the present legislation are all one finds in the bill. The business "francization" requirements would be tightened a half-turn, but not extended to firms with fewer than 50 employees.

And an increasingly popular loophole to get around the restrictions on admission to English schools, used by all of 4,000 pupils over the past five years, would be closed. This is the one that makes a child eligible to attend English public school, and siblings and eventually offspring eligible as well, after as little as a year in a non-subsidized English school.

This loophole would be closed in the name of fairness. Henceforth, it would be only the really rich, those who can afford the higher fees at non-subsidized schools for their children's entire schooling, who would have the right to buy their way around the restrictions.

In order to pad her skimpy bill, Lemieux sought to close another, previously unsuspected loophole. Actually, this one is more like a pinhole. It's the one that allows a child admitted to English school as a special case because of learning difficulties or for humanitarian reasons to bring along brothers and sisters for comfort and support.

It's hard to say how serious a problem this is, since Lemieux was unable to say how many children have taken advantage of this provision. Or maybe she was just too embarrassed to admit how few there are.

The last phase of the operation is to get the legislation through the National Assembly before people have time to remember the number of Quebec's latest language bill (104). It's no accident that the bill was introduced just a week before the deadline for legislation to be adopted before the summer recess.

So by the time the PQ national council next meets in the fall, the bill should be, as they say in the official and common language, a fait accompli.

- Don Macpherson is The Gazette's Quebec-affairs columnist, based in Montreal. His E-mail address is dmacpher@thegazette.southam.ca.