Is Gérald Tremblay up to one of the toughest challenges of a Quebec political leader?

That is, can the mayor of Montreal manage a language debate and keep it from widening the already existing divisions in his one-year-old city between non-francophone former suburbanites and francophone residents of the former core city?

We're about to find out since a new language policy for the city is in the works.

A committee of councillors from Tremblay's Montreal Island Citizens Union party is to submit a proposal to the rest of the MICU caucus at city hall in about a month. Its proposal is to take into account recommendations being drafted by the city's director of communications and citizen relations. Then the MICU caucus is to submit its proposal to the administration for final adoption before the summer.

The new policy is intended to expand the city's use of English to reflect the increase in its proportion of non-francophone residents resulting from its annexation of former Montreal Island suburbs last year.

While the new megacity was declared officially French in the law forcing the predominantly non-francophone suburbs to merge with the mainly francophone core city, it's nevertheless allowed to provide some services in English as well.

The MICU caucus is dominated by representatives of the former suburbs, including some well-known English-rights advocates who apparently intend to expand the city's use of English as much as the law allows.

But even though the proportion of francophones is smaller in the new Montreal than in the old one, the megacity is still predominantly French-speaking.

Montreal is home to Quebec's most militant nationalists (the proportion of francophones who are sovereignist is actually higher in the city than in the Saguenay-Lac St. Jean region).

They have long held that as French goes in Quebec's metropolis, so it will go in the whole province. And to them, a proposal to offer additional services in English at city hall is one to raise the status of English at the expense of French.

One of the English-rights advocates in Tremblay's party is Robert Libman, founding leader of the Equality Party and former mayor of the suburb of Côte St. Luc.

Libman says language "may be a bigger issue for the PQ government than for the average Montrealer." That might be true, for the simple reason that the average (that is, francophone) Montrealer feels that his or her language is more secure as long as the PQ is in office to protect it. And for the next few months at least, the PQ will still be in power, keeping a wary eye on developments at Montreal's city hall.

It's been suggested that the PQ might like nothing better than to run on a promise to keep Montreal French in the provincial election this spring.

But that would be easier for the PQ if it hadn't been in power for more than eight years. The PQ leadership is already having trouble mobilizing the party's hardcore supporters for the campaign in the absence of an imminent referendum on sovereignty. It might have trouble explaining to them why the government passed a law allowing more English at Montreal's city hall.

Some nationalists have been afraid all along that the linguistic minorities would have more political clout after Montreal swallowed its non-francophone suburbs. At the time of the mergers, they even feared that non-francophones would soon form the majority in the new city (though those fears might have been allayed by data from last year's census indicating that the French-speaking majority is no longer declining).

In response, the government made it harder for cities to become officially bilingual and in effect declared Montreal officially French forever (or at least until some future government dares to amend the law), regardless of the linguistic composition of its population.

So the government has been trying to exert pressure on the Tremblay administration to minimize the expansion of English services. As for the provincial opposition parties, no doubt they are hoping that the dust will have settled by the time either of them takes power in Quebec City, so that they won't have to deal with the problem.

dmacpher@thegazette.southam.ca