As with its sister legislation, Bill 21, the fundamental issue raised by Bill 96, Quebec’s hideous new language law, is not just the rights of minorities or the constitutional division of powers, but what kind of country we are.
It’s not on, obviously. While it is gratifying to have spelled out in black and white just whom the provincial government includes in its definition of “Quebecers,” the province has no power in law to impose such a clause on the rest of Canada, with its vast implications for everything from the division of powers to the ancient constitutional guarantees, as old as Canada, of equal status for English and French in its legislature and courts.
Where until now the language of work provisions applied only to businesses with more than 50 employees, now businesses with as few as 25 would be forced to submit. Where Bill 101 concerned itself mostly with education – which children of which parents were eligible to attend school in which language – Bill 96 pokes its bureaucratic nose into the furthest corners of the health care system.
But perhaps the OLF might not know where to look? The bill takes care of that, too, empowering private citizens to tell the authorities of any infraction of the language laws they suspect might have occurred or be about to – to snitch, in other words – without fear of exposure. Speak the wrong language at work, even in private, and risk being informed on by a co-worker. Fun!
It is difficult to see any purpose in this but intimidation and harassment. It is one thing to mandate that French-speakers have the right to work or receive service in their preferred language, quite another to prohibit the same to speakers of other languages – or, as in the case of CEGEPs, to francophones themselves. Warrantless searches and snitch lines ought to be a red flag: The more repressive the means required to enforce a law, the more likely it is that the law itself is misconceived.
I think we should stop subsidizing quebec until they can accept the national official languages of Canada.
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