Tom Mulcair: Is the CAQ setting up French to fail?

I’ve developed a theorem about government press conferences: The number of ministers present is inversely proportional to the importance of the announcement.

I see it regularly at both the federal and provincial levels. Sunday’s snoozefest about the Leagult government’s $600-million plan to “reverse the decline” of Quebec’s majority language was a classic.

Six — count ’em, six — ministers lined up at the same time to lament the state of the French language and propose themselves as the solution in their respective areas.

Journalists asked basic questions, like: in light of the recent report by the Office québécois de la langue française that French isn’t doing as badly as your government says, what new evidence do you have?

The answer, of course, is none.

I would not expect any amount of evidence to ever convince Premier François Legault that things aren’t as bad as he says.

Sunday’s press conference was meant to drive home his message that there’s still lots to fear, especially foreigners. This would seem to have little to do with evidence and everything to do with the Parti Québécois being way ahead of the Coalition Avenir Québec in the polls. Legault wants to win back the ethnic nationalist vote.

The Quebec Community Groups Network did everyone a favour by putting out a simple press release shortly after the CAQ press conference. In it they asked the most important question: Is the Quebec government setting French up to
fail?

QCGN president Eva Ludvig justifiably put everyone on warning about the report card — or “dashboard” — that French Language Minister Jean-François Roberge has introduced to measure the state of French in Quebec.

Her key point is worth quoting at length: “What was missing in today’s presentation was mention of the yardsticks the government intends to use to measure the health of French. A news report on an early version of the plan suggested the expected measurements are largely those known in advance to automatically indicate declines in French: mother tongue, language used mainly at home, and first official language spoken. And Minister Roberge today mentioned mother tongue as one of the worrisome statistics the government has observed.”

Many experts (and minister Roberge is not one of them) have been signalling for some time that the government has been reading too much into certain statistics like the language people speak in the privacy of their own homes.

Jean-Pierre Corbeil is arguably the leading Quebec expert on these complex matters and he was one of the main authors of a recent tome that questioned the official dogma about the presumed decline of French. In a superb commentary in La
Presse, he summarized the current state of scholarship and the lack of thorough, credible analysis in much of what gets printed on this emotional question.

Corbeil notes that “in putting the accent mostly on the relative decrease of French as a mother tongue and principal language used at home, as well as the slowness of third-language families to adopt French as the principal language at home, the idea that there has been a ‘decline’ gradually imposed itself as obvious.”

He mentions also that any attempt to nuance the prevailing impression is considered a denial of reality. Countless newspaper reports simply affirm that there’s been a
“decline” of French and it is now seen as a proven fact by many.

The government has absolutely no business at the kitchen tables of the nation. Targeting what language people speak in the sanctity of their own home or their mother tongue (which nobody can change) can engender intolerance against people for who they are, even if they speak French in all aspects of their work and life in society. Using those as “yardsticks” should cause a flashing red light on the government’s own dashboard that acts as a warning to avoid what could become a slippery slope to racism.

Tom Mulcair, a former leader of the federal NDP, served as minister of the environment in the Quebec Liberal government of Jean Charest.