By David Johnston - MONTREAL - There weren't very many Windsors or Frasers or O'Dowds at the helm of the Quiet Revolution in Quebec. The protagonists were virtually all francophones. There was one big exception. Eric Kierans.
At the peak of the Quiet Revolution, the societal transformation said to have been born 50 years ago Tuesday with the election of a new reformist government under Liberal Jean Lesage, Kierans was the only anglo at the centre of executive power in the cabinet of Premier Jean Lesage.
The son of an Irish father and a German mother, Kierans grew up in central Montreal. He taught at McGill University and ran his own business, Canadian Adhesives. But it was as president of the Montreal Stock Exchange, where he clashed with the old anglo establishment, that he was recruited to run for the Liberals in a 1963 byelection in Notre-Dame-de-Grace.
Kierans won that byelection, and went on to serve with distinction as revenue minister and later health minister, before jumping to federal politics. But he came very close to saying No to Lesage in 1963. In his memoir, Remembering, published in 2001, Kierans describes going up to Quebec City to tell Lesage he didn't think his French was good enough.
"I told him that I still had a problem with French, and he said I would soon get over it," wrote Kierans, who died in 2004 at age 91.
The Quiet Revolution was about a lot of things, not just the place of French. At its most fundamental level, it was about the secularization of Quebec, an undertaking that saw government bureaucracy wrestle control over health, education and social affairs away from the Roman Catholic church. It also saw the beginning of a new active role for the state in the economy, most notably with the nationalization of hydro resources through Hydro-Quebec. At the same time, those six years from 1960 to 1966 heralded a more active response from Quebec to perceived federal infringement on provincial jurisdiction.
Through it all, Anglos were largely on the sidelines. Both the Montreal Star and The Montreal Gazette had endorsed the Union Nationale in the 1960 election, although other anglo opinion leaders, like the anglo population at large, were divided between the UN and the Liberals, or on the question of whether change in Quebec was a good or bad thing.
If it can be said that there was such a thing as a collective anglo response to the Quiet Revolution, it was probably French immersion. This new quiet revolution in second-language learning was created in 1966, in the South Shore suburb of St. Lambert, by a group of anglo parents who saw a role for school boards to play in helping to make young children bilingual.
But despite all the progress made in second-language acquisition since then, recent evidence suggests the kind of insecurity that Kierans expressed to Lesage hasn't gone away.
Last year, the youth wing of the Quebec Community Groups Network, an anglophone service organization, came out with a study that found widespread unease among young Anglos with their quality of French, despite French immersion and high official rates of bilingualism. And this past school year has seen both of Montreal's English school boards have to deal with rising parental discontent with the quality of immersion instruction in English schools.
Larry DePoe, Quebec director of Canadian Parents for French, the national organization that promotes French second-language acquisition in schools, says the problem in Quebec is that a lot of Anglos basically stop learning French after they get out of high school.
Some students go on to junior college and deliberately take easy French courses in order to keep up their grade-point average and increase their chances of getting into university.
Robert Libman, who became a household name in Quebec when he led an anglo protest party, the Equality Party, to four seats in the national assembly in the 1989 election, says the gradual disappearance of French from young Anglos' lives after high school is similar to the way many Jewish children start losing their Hebrew after high school.
"You can learn a language pedagogically through the school system — the rules of grammar, and so on — but if you don't use it afterwards, it's going to get rusty at first, then dissipate over time," said Libman.
Lesage was right about Kierans. The premier's only anglo cabinet minister eventually got over his insecurity in French — the more he started using the language.
Libman was born in 1960, the same year that Kierans, as president of the Montreal Stock Exchange, worked to get Jews admitted as member brokers, and to put an end to official retributions for speaking French on the trading floor.
Growing up in the Chomedey district of Laval, Libman says he lived a very sheltered life within the district's then-thriving Jewish community. He attended Jewish private school and says he really didn't get to know a non-anglophone, non-Jew until he attended McGill University in the early 1980s. As he wrote in his 1995 book, Riding the Rapids: The White Water Rise and Fall of Quebec's Anglo Protest, it wasn't until he got out into the workforce and started having to use French regularly that his school-learned French started coming back to him.
In 1989, he led the Equality Party into a provincial election that had been called in the wake of then Liberal Premier Robert Bourassa's decision to invoke the federal constitution's notwithstanding clause in response to a Supreme Court judgment in favour of bilingual signage. The judgment, which overturned Bill 101's prohibition on English on signage, created a language crisis in Quebec that saw the anglophone community rally behind Equality. The issue was resolved in 1993 when the Bourassa Liberals finally legalized bilingual signs, under certain conditions.
Through those years from 1989 to 1993, the larger issue of the place of the anglophone community in Quebec was something that the francophone community started to look at through a different focus. By now, it had become clear to francophones that Anglos were making an collective effort to learn French. But Anglos were now asking the francophone community to reconcile its own desire for a strong vibrant French presence in Montreal with a readiness to give the minority anglophone community the permission and tools to be visible and vibrant, too.
It has never been crystal clear to Anglos whether the government of Quebec, or francophones in general, really want a visible and vibrant English-speaking community. From the stern admonitions with respect to anything English from of the Parti Quebecois to the hey-we-can-beat-up-the-Anglos-too propensities of the provincial Liberal party, Anglos say the net result is that they are often made to feel like outsiders in Quebec.
Shaun Peppy, founder of the young wing of the QCGN anglo service organization, says the study that came out last year suggesting Anglos aren't confident in their French proficiency needs to be seen against this political backdrop of Anglos still not feeling truly welcome. Against this backdrop, Anglos conclude their French will never be good enough. So they don't join anything where there is a lot of French. Or they don't apply for a job at Hydro-Quebec, or with the local clinic, when they get out of university. At least that's the way Peppy, 29, a native of the Gatineau region near Ottawa and policy analyst with the federal government, sees it.
"Looking back at the Quiet Revolution and the extent to which there are still two solitudes," said Peppy, "one of the things that is very different today, from the way I imagine it was 50 years ago, is that young English-speaking Quebecers really want to break down the barriers.
"There's a huge willingness to integrate. They want to learn French. They want to be integrated in their community. They want to live and work in Quebec. To me, that is a major first step."
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