Huntingdon Mayor Stéphane Gendron is seeking to affirm the town’s right to serve the sizable minority of its anglophone residents in their own language.
The town’s persistently controversial and famously flamboyant mayor has invited prosecution by the language-enforcement authorities, along with the wrath of the provincial political establishment, with his insistence on sending official town communications to residents in bilingual form, even though the anglo minority is insufficient in number to qualify for fully bilingual service under the language law.
Told to cut it out by the Office de la langue française, Gendron has defiantly told the language watchdog to, in short, stuff it. At more considerable length he has railed against the language-law strictures to which the authorities want to hold the town with a vehemence unheard since the heyday of Howard Galganov and William “Pit Bill” Johnson.
He damned the language policy as “racist” and “imbecilic,” and sneered at French-language hawks as “insecure and culturally deprived.” He called the Charest government, which came down against him, hypocritical for offering bilingual communications of its own while banning his town’s right to do the same.
Gendron has a point in maintaining that it is not only an eminently reasonable accommodation to do what the town is doing, but fundamentally in keeping with the town’s history, character and linguistic reality.
Huntingdon, population by last official count 2,457, is southwest of Montreal, closer to the U.S. border than to the outer reaches of the metropolis. It used to be an English-majority town, but like so many such communities in the provincial hinterland it has been drained by anglo out-migration in recent decades. The last census shows residents whose first language is English down to 44 per cent – six per cent short of the language-law threshold for allowing bilingual communication from town hall.
By all accounts Huntingdon is a haven of peaceful and contented English-French coexistence.
On-the-street surveys by media outlets suggest that there is strong support for the mayor’s stand from residents, both French and English. (Gendron says he suspects the complaint about the town’s practice – it was a single complaint that spurred the OLF to horse – was lodged by a “language Taliban” from Montreal taking advantage of an easy target.)
But righteous as his fight might be, he has embarked on a risky course, both by flouting the law and by using his characteristic heated language.
Gendron has a history of intemperate outbursts – such as his recent denunciation of Israel as a quasi-Nazi state that doesn’t deserve to exist – and a notorious hankering for the spotlight. That has his critics saying that with his language fight he’s courting publicity for himself as much as standing on principle. And they also have a point in maintaining that the law is the law, and for elected officials to flout it is unseemly in a democratic system such as ours.
As such, Gendron’s fight appears destined to be a losing one. The government, starting with the premier, has come down four-square on the side of the OLF, as have all parties in the National Assembly and the run of francophone punditry.
Rather than leading to a breakthrough for anglo rights, Gendron’s crusade seems more likely, if he holds his ground, to hit little Huntingdon with a $40,000 fine. The Parti Québécois has demanded that the town be taken under trusteeship if the mayor doesn’t back down.
Rather than breaking the law, a more acceptable way to press his point would be to challenge it in court or to petition for a change in it.
Gendron has proposed that municipalities with an anglophone population of 10 per cent or more be required to provide bilingual service. That’s asking a lot. A more reasonable proposal would be to require municipalities with 50 per cent or more anglo residents to provide bilingual service, and give other towns the option of doing so.
But the sad reality, as demonstrated by the all-party reaction to Gendron’s campaign, is that under present circumstances asking for any change in the language law that would benefit the province’s English-speaking minority is asking too much.
In a Quebec language debate, reason is inevitably trumped by ideology and paranoia over the imminent disappearance of French, unrealistic as that prospect might be.