Personality battles and petty squabbles must not be allowed to sink Alliance Quebec, an organization with a respectable if mottled history and considerable potential. Recent complaints about AQ president Brent Tyler and his style in office can only do damage to the Alliance as well as its leader.

We know very well about Tyler's pugnacious nature and his hair-trigger temper, and we regret them. Public persons can't afford volcanic anger, and Tyler, like his critics, has the unhappy power to draw attention away from both his own accomplishments and those of AQ.

That said, we must add that we detect a whiff of sour grapes in the latest round of complaints about how he fulfills his office. The spectacle of factional mudfights brings solace to no one who has the welfare of Quebec's anglophones at heart.

This week's uproar over what AQ does, and how, will prove to have been damaging if it imperils the organization's funding from the federal government, funding already cut back more than once and the subject of apparently endless reviews, reassessments and reconsiderations. Why can Ottawa monitor and fret over AQ's $638,000 so much more assiduously than it guards the $1 billion being poured into the gun registry or the thousands of dollars squandered on duplicated sponsorship studies?

More of Tyler's critics need to state their names and then to explain exactly what prompted all this. As far as we can ascertain in the welter of vague half-claims, the key assertion is that Tyler as president of AQ is pursuing a strategy of court challenges to various provincial laws and regulations that restrict anglophone rights and freedoms.

If that's all there is, his critics are wrong: this strategy is an asset, not a fault. Tyler campaigned for the office, as we recall, on a promise to do just this, and it seems to have worked well in at least some cases.

Frankly, we think forthright legal battles are more seemly and sensible than either the quiet-word-with-the-deputy-minister-over-drinks-at-the-club approach that marked Alliance Quebec's early years or the street-protest tactics of the Bill Johnson era.

In part because of the organization's electoral cycle, AQ often seems to lag behind the mood of the anglophone community in Montreal. In part because it's dominated by Montreal, AQ has often seemed to be out of touch with the realities of anglophone life outside the metropolis. For these reasons, AQ has not been a success as a large membership organization. Very few anglos accept AQ as their "voice" in any political sense.

But anglophone rights still need defending here, just as francophone rights do elsewhere in Canada. In both cases, it's appropriate that Ottawa provide some funding.

But what role is right for Alliance Quebec? What tactics? In Quebec's far-flung towns and townships where the emotional and cultural impact of minority status is a daily burden, neither the elite approach nor the "angryphone" style can ultimately do much good. And in Montreal, the realities of language demographics, more than seven years after the referendum, are a weather-vane for AQ: Hardly anyone is angry about language these days. But anglophones do sometimes have language problems with the many-tentacled apparatus of the state, where bureaucrats might for whatever reason apply the law harshly or use regulations in mean-spirited or simply foolish ways.

The key word there is law. Language is governed in Quebec, as it is governed almost no place else on Earth, by a thick skein of laws. Some legal challenges against our language laws are won, some are lost. Sometimes just going to court in one case has the effect of inhibiting enforcement of an unwise law in other cases. Some court challenges might reduce the political impulse to pass further language laws. All can be played out in the relative serenity of the legal system, not in the streets or in the rowdy political arena.

Overall, the legal approach seems to be AQ's most appropriate stance in this period of general linguistic tranquility. Tyler and the word "tranquility" fit uneasily in the same paragraph, but his strategy, at least, is right for the times.