Independent MNA Pierre Curzi’s “new Bill 101” was warmly received by his former colleagues in the Parti Québécois, which – if the results of current public-opinion polls don’t change – is poised to form the next provincial government.
Health care used as an instrument of language policy in Quebec?
Your medicare card used as a language-identification card?
Restrictions on access to English health care similar to those on access to English schools?
Denying immigrants the help of interpreters in the health system to describe their symptoms – or those of their children, their parents or other loved ones – so that they have to learn French?
All these ideas have been raised recently, not by cellar pamphleteers, but by members of mainstream French Quebec society.
And before you laugh them off, remember that some language proposals originally dismissed as ridiculous, such as banning English from commercial signs, went on to become law in this province.
The medicare-card proposal was made last week by independent MNA Pierre Curzi in his “new Bill 101,” which also proposed to extend to preschool, as well as to CEGEPs, the restrictions on admission to English schools.
The bill was warmly received by Curzi’s former colleagues in the Parti Québécois, which is currently poised to form the next government, as a potential source of new ideas.
Section 32 of Curzi’s bill would require an applicant for a new or renewed medicare card to give his or her mother tongue.
This information would be recorded on the card, and used to determine whether a health or social-services establishment officially recognized as bilingual, such as the McGill University Health Centre hospitals, would keep that status.
If a majority of the people served by the establishment did not have English as their mother tongue, the government could, after consulting “the citizens concerned,” withdraw its recognition.
If it did, then the establishment would no longer be allowed to use English in internal communications, and its staff would have to write to each other in French.
It’s not hard to imagine additional ways that nationalists might like to use the “Curzi card.”
Section 15 of Quebec’s health and social services act says that all “English-speaking persons” are entitled to receive those services in English. Nationalists complain that this undermines Bill 101 by encouraging immigrants not to learn French.
Writing in Le Devoir on Tuesday, a University of Ottawa expert on language law, André Braën, proposed that the act be amended to restrict entitlement to English health and social services to “an English-speaking Canadian citizen.”
The medicare card, which all Quebecers over one year old are required to have, is already used as all-purpose identification. The Curzi card could be used to restrict access to English health and social services to only people who have English as their mother tongue, those whom nationalists consider “true” anglophones.
In fact, the card could be used to restrict access to all public services in English, which nationalists complain are too readily available. Braën wrote that all public bodies, except for those officially recognized as bilingual, should offer services in French only, except for health and social services.
It was another former PQ MNA, Joseph Facal, who complained about a growing use of translators for immigrants in the Quebec health system.
In a column in February in the Journal de Montréal, the province’s most-read daily, Facal said this is one reason immigrants don’t bother to learn French. He wrote that it should be up to immigrants to adapt to Quebec, not the other way around.
He did allow that it is “easier” to treat a patient if you understand what he or she is feeling.
Not only that, it’s better for the patient’s health. It’s hard enough for someone who is sick, in pain or worried to express him or herself, let alone in a second language.
But Facal’s priority was the health of French, not the health of immigrants.
“When you go to the hospital, and you’re in pain, you may need a blood test, but you certainly don’t need a language test,” Lucien Bouchard once said, as his former speech writer, Jean-François Lisée, recently reminded readers of The Gazette.
Bouchard was PQ premier at the time, and his parliamentary secretary was none other than Joseph Facal.
But that was back in 1996. Clearly Facal’s thinking, and that of other nationalists, has “evolved” since then.
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