OK, we get it. Outremont MP Thomas Mulcair, Quebec's sole NDP flag-bearer, wants to make sure he'll get re-elected, and to have his party win more seats, too. This is the nearest we can come to a logical explanation for all the noise he and the NDP are making about being 100-per-cent behind Quebec's "Frenchness." That this is a measured affront to anglophone Quebec doesn't seem to matter. We're just collateral damage in the quest for votes.
It was Mulcair who introduced this week's motion, affirming Quebec's right to require that immigrants to the province learn French. In its vague way, the resolution asserted broadly a "right" the Supreme Court framed much more carefully in last week's Bill 104 decision about access to English schools.
Still, all parties lined up dutifully behind it, prudently unwilling to offend francophone sentiment. The big parties, however, were equally careful to point out that the motion did not exactly break new ground. Mulcair "is trying to drive through an open door," said Liberal MP Justin Trudeau. "This whole thing is a PR exercise."
Citizenship Minister Jason Kenney described the motion as "more to do with symbolic politics than anything else."
But the Bloc Québécois eagerly backed Mulcair's motion, promising to use it as a tool to promote sovereignty.
Of course, this isn't the first time Mulcair - and his leader Jack Layton - have shown themselves willing to sell out Quebec anglophones. In April 2008, the NDP supported a Bloc motion to impose Quebec's Language Charter on the 275,000 Quebecers working for federally-regulated companies and agencies. Liberal MP Marlene Jennings rightly called this a "sellout" of anglophone rights, and the grown-up parties defeated the motion.
Actually the NDP's flirtation with hard-line Quebec nationalism goes back a long way. In 1961, at its inaugural convention, the NDP became the first federal party to assert that Canada was formed by "two founding nations."
Nearly 50 years and two referendums later, it seems the NDP hasn't grasped that minority language communities need and deserve federal-government support.
The presence of a few more students in the English school system in Quebec is not going affect the future of a province where more than 80 per cent of the people have French as a mother tongue.
Mulcair drifts dangerously close to demagoguery when he describes a small legal loophole as a "disaster." He should know better.