Imagine if an Alberta politician campaigned on the need to ban French on signs outside of stores in this province, or at least to have English twice the size of French. Imagine also if she demanded that businesses with more than 10 employees enforce English as the lingua franca of the workplace.
For good measure, imagine if the Alberta politician also demanded that new immigrants to the province educate their children in English, and no other language. Then think about the reaction to a proposed “secular charter” bill that would restrict the ability of public servants to wear “conspicuous religious signs,” but would make an exception for the crucifix. Then consider the reaction to a party campaign video that went so far as to highlight a cross to further make the point.
Somehow — and we’d bet every family farm and half the Alberta Heritage Savings Trust Fund — that newspapers, politicians, pundits and legislature across Canada would condemn Alberta en masse. They would make few if any sensible distinctions between such nuttiness and sensible Albertans. All the usual stereotypes would be dragged out of the closet.
Pity then that the predictable anti-Alberta types won’t get the chance to beat up on Wild Rose Country, given that all the examples just noted come from Quebec. There, provincial opposition leader and Parti Quebecois head Pauline Marois is proposing to restrict English even more.
Moreover, all of the laws and limits cited above are either already in place in Quebec (restrictions on English signs, workplace mandates for French, restrictions on English education), or proposed (applying workplace restrictions to small business and a secular charter law). Marois backed down on a proposal to force would-be politicians to pass a French test. She changed it to read that people who want Quebec citizenship would have to know French.
In a video entitled Quelle direction le Quebec doit-il prendre, Parti Quebecois, where Montreal’s Mount Royal cross is conspicuously featured, it appears almost everyone and everything is an enemy of the distinct Quebec society that Marois envisions and wants to enforce with the heavy hand of the state.
The video, which our editorial colleagues at the National Post rightly labelled “creepy,” includes predictable partisan pictures of not only Liberal leader and Quebec Premier Jean Charest and Prime Minister Stephen Harper, but images of Queen Elizabeth II, Pierre Trudeau and Alberta’s oilsands. (Memorandum to Marois — if you dislike the oilsands so much, feel free to return the $7.4-billion in equalization payments from the federal government that result in part from Alberta’s wealth-creating dynamo, the oilsands.)
It’s hard to know what to make of the narrow-minded nativism of Marois and her party. In Alberta, when people still occasionally complain about French, it’s usually about the double standard. That’s where Quebec gets to thump on English for decades while Alberta is even criticized by some for not providing traffic tickets in French. No one prominent in provincial politics, academia or the media, has suggested restricting anyone’s right to speak, become educated or work in French, or in any other language.
In the last Alberta election, Wildrose leader Danielle Smith was pilloried by some in and outside Alberta because her party platform contained a proposal that Alberta consider a provincial pension plan (which Quebec already has); Smith was chastised for not being pan-national enough when she dared venture that Premier Alison Redford was not robust enough in defence of Alberta’s interests.
Whether Smith and her party were right or wrong on that or other issues is irrelevant. What the reaction then and now points to is how the double standard on language and culture is alive and well in Canada in 2012. It’s a pity that such nativism among Quebec separatists has become so predictable as to barely register in political and media circles in the rest of Canada.