Jared Milne
2 min readNov 7, 2021

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I hope you don't mind my playing Devil's Advocate for a moment, but from my own experiences in Quebec and trying to better see things from the Franco-Quebecois perspective, I've come to actually support a lot of what Quebec's language laws try to do.

The catch is, and always has been, the imbalance of power between English and French in Canada. It's less of a concern for Anglophone Canadians to maintain their languages when the presence of our southern neighbour ensures that it's always going to have a powerful basis and incentive for new arrivals to adopt it. Quebec, OTOH, is in the nearly unique position of being the only French majority place on a majority English continent while also having its own Anglo minority.

You talk, and rightly so, about the value of multilingual diversity in Montreal. But how much of that would actually be happening today were it not for Quebec's efforts at 'francization'? If most of the migrants coming in simply used English, then how would it look to the local population that the new arrivals don't seem to care about trying to fit in and that the locals should be the only ones learning to speak to them? Quebec' language laws have even strengthened national unity by undermining the arguments for separatism, something even the original architect of Bill 101 lamented.

I can only imagine how grating it could be to Quebecers for them to be the only ones expected to accommodate both official languages when so many people in the other provinces throw a fit at the idea of accomodating French in their own provinces. It'd be like a French person coming to Alberta or Saskatchewan and demanding that everyone only speak to them in French, without their making an effort to learn English.

Even the federal bilingualism policies dating back to Pierre Trudeau were a sort of de facto affirmative action in provinces like Alberta, favouring French over other languages like Ukrainian. And that's perfectly fine with me, since IMO French is a founding language for the country in a way that other languages like Spanish or German are not, and ought to be prioritized in our schools, courts and political institutions in ways that the latter languages aren't. (Everything I'm saying in this comment could also apply to Indigenous people and their languages, but that's a subject for another day.)

I say all this as a guy who grew up in French immersion, went to a French language campus and even wrote my grad thesis in French. I've had nothing but positive experiences in Jonquiere and Quebec City and I've been able to see more of the Francophone perspective on the whole issue. It's just my two (now out of circulation) cents, but I hope I've at least done justice to the people I've learned from and spoken with.

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Jared Milne

Passionately devoted to Canadian unity. Fascinated by Canadian politics and history. Striving to understand the mysteries of Canada. Publishes every few weeks.