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Why the English fled Quebec -The untold story: Francophones continue driving English-speakers from Quebec while expanding French usage across Canada.

Article Excerpt
BY PETER STOCK

Gloria McCullough used to work as a clerk in the claims section at Chubb and Sons, a national insurance company. In 1977, French-language police entered her office in Montreal. "I was told that I had to be tested. If I didn't pass, I had to take language lessons. If I failed to pass the French course, I'd lose my job. If I passed the first course, I'd be assigned another until my French was considered almost perfectly fluent." Precisely the same imposition was made on her husband Rick, who worked for a Montreal-area plumbing company.

In 1982, the young couple fled to Edmonton. "No one in the rest of Canada seems to understand what really caused the

ethnic cleansing of the English in Quebec," Mr. McCullough says ruefully. "People here think the Quebec language law is about signs being in French, not English. That's a joke. Do Canadians really think that several hundred thousand people left their native province over signs? There's been no real communication of the French tactics."

Also not well understood in by most citizens in English Canada is the sheer complexity of the language issue. Among the major components are:

Outside Quebec, French rights have been asserted primarily in the public sector, meaning within the courts, schools, police and other government-regulated institutions. The major thrusts pushing French-language expansion in English Canada are the Liberal Party and the federal bureaucracy.

Within Quebec, the provincial public sector already consists almost entirely of native francophones (about 97%). French-language promotion in Quebec targets the private workplace, forcing Anglos and immigrants to function in French. Powering this strategy is the provincial government.

Immigrants within Quebec are another crucial factor in the language struggle. The provincial government aggressively attempts to force their children to study in French. Behind that drive is the fact that Quebec's francophones have one of the lowest birth rates in the world.

There is a self-evident contradiction between Quebec's strategy to form a largely unilingual province and Ottawa's determination to create bilingualism (in practice, this means more French-language rights) across the country. Particularly noteworthy is Ottawa's failure to protect English-language rights in Quebec. The likeliest cause of that failure is the fear that Quebec voters will opt for separation if Ottawa is seen as a fundamental threat to French primacy in the province. Elsewhere in Canada, anglophones are less resistant to ongoing federal attempts to extend French usage within their communities.

"In Quebec, there has actually been a deliberate strategy to drive the English out," says Jim Kalasatidis, the president of the provincial Equality Party. It starts, he says, with blatant discrimination within the public sector. "You cannot join the federal, provincial or municipal civil services unless you speak

fluent French," Mr. Kalasatidis notes.

"French is also a prerequisite for most jobs in the private sector [within Quebec], even when you do not need French to do the job," he continues. "The law requires private businesses with 50 employees or more to obtain a Frenchization certificate. The language of the workplace must be French, even if you do your sales in English. The...

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