Charter of The French Language - Opposition and Support

Opposition and Support

The Charter of the French Language has been received poorly by many anglophones.

Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and provinces outside Quebec criticized the Charter strongly. In his memoirs, Trudeau described Bourassa's Bill 22 as a "slap in the face", as it ran contrary to the federal government's initiative to mandate bilingualism. Except for New Brunswick, most other provinces that accepted grudgingly Trudeau's bilingualism initiative never fully implemented it, likely in protest to Quebec's language laws. The most notable case was Ontario, where Premier Bill Davis refused to grant full status to francophones, despite the fact that the infrastructure was already in place.

Political opposition to the Charter and earlier francophone-favoring language legislation has had limited success, given the support of the laws by the Parti Québécois and Quebec Liberal Party. Legislative initiatives prior to Bill 101 were often denounced by francophones as insufficient, such as An Act to promote the French language in Quebec (Bill 63). After Bourassa passed the Official Language Act, opponents turned their support to the Union Nationale in the 1976 election, but despite that short resurgence of support, the party collapsed in the subsequent election. Court challenges have been more successful: Many of the key provisions of the initial language legislation having been rewritten to comply with rulings. Despite compliance since 1993 of the Charter with the Canadian constitution, opposition to the Charter and the government body enforcing it has continued.

According to Statistics Canada, up to 244,000 English-speaking people have emigrated from Quebec to other provinces since the 1970s, and the Quebec population of those whose mother tongue is English had dropped from 789,000 in 1971 to 575,555 in 2006. According to the 2006 Canadian census, 575,555 (7.6% of population) in Quebec declare English as their only mother tongue, 744,430 (10%) use mostly English as their home language, and 918,955 (12.2%) comprise the Official Language Minority, having English as their First Official language spoken. Because many anglophones relocated outside of Quebec after the introduction of the Charter in the 1970s, several English-language schools in Montreal closed their doors. This is only partially the cause, since the restrictions on who can attend English schools are also an ongoing drain on the English school system. Many companies, most notably Sun Life, Royal Bank and Bank of Montreal (which even considered removing "Montreal" from its name), moved their major operations to Toronto as a consequence of the adoption of this law. This concerted fleeing of business and subsequent loss of thousands of jobs is sometimes said to have hindered Quebec's economy and allowed Toronto to overtake Montreal as Canada's business centre. On the other hand, Toronto's advantage had been growing since the 1930s and had become apparent in the 1950s, and is also related to the greater importance of the U.S., rather than Britain, in Canada's economy. It can also be said that this movement led to a larger role for Quebec Inc. in Quebec's economy.

Levying fines of up to $7000 per offence, Charter enforcers were widely derided in English media as the "language police" or "tongue troopers". While the Office québécois de la langue française (OQLF) provides several warnings before resorting to legal sanctions, alleged abuse of its power has led to charges of racism and harassment. The OQLF urged stores to remove imported kosher goods that did not meet labelling requirements, an action perceived in the Jewish community as an unfair targeting that coincided with a high-profile case against the well-known Schwartz's delicatessen, the owner of which was told that the apostrophe in his sign was illegal. In 2002, there were reported cases of harassment of allophone merchants who refused to speak French.

The 2004 annual report of the OQLF was criticized by a columnist of The Gazette who complained of a "totalitarian mindset in the bureaucracy". The columnist believed the report contained sections describing the continued prevalence of languages other than French in two-thirds of Montreal's households as an "alarming" trend, because it would present a formidable challenge to francophones in Montreal. In reality, the report judged alarming the fact that adoption of English as home language by allophones grew faster than the adoption of French as home language.

The use of the notwithstanding clause in the 1990s to circumvent the Quebec Charter of Rights and Freedoms with regards to signage also drew a reaction in other Canadian provinces; the syndrome de Sault Ste. Marie was a series of symbolic but divisive resolutions by some municipalities outside Quebec declaring their towns unilingually English in protest of this supposed infringement on the rights embodied in the charter. It is often believed that the controversy over the Charter was what caused the Meech Lake Accord and Charlottetown Accord to fail. It should be noted that the Supreme Court in their ruling regarding the signs case which led to the use of the notwithstanding clause, ruled that in fact any sign law was a violation of the freedom of expression right.

Aside from the civil rights infringement, the Charter has faced legal challenges because the restricted education opportunities have hindered not only unilingual but bilingual anglophones' employment. Although the Charter made French the official language of government and civil administration, the same cannot be said of the private sector. Despite nearly 30 years of the Charter, it has never been applied as rigorously as intended because to do so would violate civil liberties. English is still often made a requirement by employers in Montreal,including many French-Canadian owned ones, and, to a lesser extent, in Gatineau and Quebec City, with the workforce in Montreal remaining largely bilingual despite the Charter.

On November 14, 1988 the political and human rights watchdog organization Freedom House published “The Doctrine of ‘Preponderance of Blood’ in South Africa, the Soviet Union and Quebec” in its journal Exchange. Introduced by Zbigniew Brzezinski (an anglophone who lived in Montreal) former U.S. President Jimmy Carter’s National Security adviser, the essay compared the language of instruction provisions of the charter with South African apartheid statutes and jurisprudence. However, the Supreme Court of Canada refused the discrimination-based-on-ancestry argument under the Quebec Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms in Gosselin (Tutor of) v. Quebec (Attorney General) on the grounds that it conflicted with section 23 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The criteria used by Quebec to determine if parents are entitled to have their children instructed in the language of the minority are the same as those found under section 23 of the Canadian Charter.