Quebecers know that when the winning conditions for sovereignty are not present, the Parti Québécois can be relied upon to try to churn up francophones' language insecurity.
It's a time-tested way to scare people into supporting a narrow, exclusive nationalism, and even demonizing anglophones and allophones. As a tactic, this would be laughably pathetic except that it's also somewhat menacing at times.
In fairness, there are important segments of today's PQ that have outgrown this game. But the tail wags the dog in that party, and the language hardliners have once again managed to agitate it. A PQ meeting about language, immigration, and identity this weekend promises - or threatens - to be focused on two unpleasant proposals.
The first, advanced by former premier Bernard Landry and others, is to deprive francophones and allophones of free choice of language at the CEGEP level. Only those who'd been to high school in English could attend an English CEGEP.
Party leader Pauline Marois has kept her distance from that idea, perhaps because she knows how poorly it would play with young francophones and their parents. But this week she came out in favour of an even more distressing new way to tighten language law: to extend Bill 101's limits on access to English schools down to the daycare level. This is doubly absurd since there can't be many daycares now that operate solely in English. Deprive parents of all choice, that should do it!
The excuse for all this social engineering is the tired, bogus claim that French is "in danger" in Quebec or in Montreal. We've said this so often we're sick of it ourselves, but it's still true: The percentage of francophones on Montreal Island is slipping almost exclusively because thousands of francophone families keep choosing to move to "la couronne" to escape Montreal's high taxes, high population density, and shabby services. On a metropolitan basis, French continues to flourish.
If the PQ used its energy to find ways for Quebec to help Montreal, the city would be a better place for francophones - and everyone else - to bring up their children. Marois mentioned that notion, in passing, in the course of proposing her new daycare controls.
Another useful way to step up francization of immigrants would be for Quebec, with the federal government, to tighten the number of newcomers who speak neither French nor English. As we have noted recently in this space, immigrants who speak neither can contribute little to the economy.
From the beginning, the fatal flaw in the sovereignty project has been its tribalism. It has has become a commonplace to say that Bill 101 saved Canada, by allaying more-or-less legitimate concerns of the 1970s about the deteriorating status of French. Since that law took hold, the PQ, pushed by its hardliners, has continued to press the panic button about language, but with ever-less credibility. From time to time some in the party try to propose a "civic nationalism" open to all, but the "us vs. them" mentality is never far below the party's surface. As long as it persists, the PQ will continue to trap itself in its own ethnic ghetto.