A protest against the Montreal Canadiens’ unilingual English-speaking interim head coach Randy Cunneyworth drew 300 protesters last Saturday.

Graeme Hamilton - Yves-Thomas Dorval, president of Quebec’s largest employers group, was in his car the Sunday before Christmas when the head of the nationalist Société St-Jean-Baptiste came on the radio urging a boycott of the National Bank. Move your mortgages and cut up your credit cards, Mario Beaulieu advised. The crime committed by the Montreal-headquartered bank? Hiring a unilingual anglophone as vice-president responsible for information technology.
Mr. Dorval blew a gasket. “Faced with the rise of irresponsible extremism on the language question on the part of a few fanatics trying to undermine certain Quebec companies, the Conseil du patronat du Québec has a duty to intervene and condemn these acts of societal sabotage,” he said in a news release. Companies operating in Quebec have a responsibility to promote the use of French, he said, but recent attacks against the bank and other companies perceived to be overly tolerant of English have gone too far.
“Trying to harm Quebec institutions by a boycott will do nothing to solve the existential issues perceived by some,” his release concluded. “It will only hurt Quebecers themselves.”
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In an interview this week, Mr. Dorval acknowledged his response was “a bit emotional,” but his emotions are not the only ones running high in Quebec over the language issue. And it’s not just fanatics who are fanning the flames.
Since November, Quebec media have been filled with denunciations of the creeping presence of English in Montreal. It began with news that two senior executives in the real estate arm of the provincial pension-fund manager, the Caisse de dépôt et placement, spoke limited French. The National Bank then came under fire, followed by Bombardier, which was accused of not doing enough to ensure a French workplace. When the Montreal Canadiens named a unilingual anglophone as interim head coach last month, it was the final straw. The hockey team was pilloried, with politicians from Montreal Mayor Gérald Tremblay to provincial Cabinet ministers criticizing the management move.
It seemed any English was too much for some. Montreal’s biggest school board announced that it would prohibit students from speaking English during recess as well as in class. One radio commentator complained about a viral video of a New Year’s Eve brawl in a Chinatown restaurant — not because of the smashed plates and thrown chairs but because the melee was conducted entirely in English. La Presse arts columnist Marc Cassivi wrote a New Year’s column on losing weight and published a playlist of songs to accompany a workout. He immediately came under fire from readers and a colleague at another newspaper because the songs were predominantly English.
“Is it just me,” he wondered in a follow-up column, or is there “a fairly unhealthy climate of hunting anglophones? Accompanied by old linguistic hang-ups that resurface where you don’t expect them?” He said he is not referring to the “absurdity” of hiring a unilingual anglophone as a manager at the Caisse or as coach of the Canadiens. “I’m talking about criticizing a columnist for occasionally listening to something other than Quebec songs when he’s knocking himself out interval training at minus-20 degrees.”
For many, the current language flare-up is another chapter in a familiar saga — the price to be paid for living in Montreal. Most Montrealers happily go about their daily lives without giving language a second thought. A protest against the Canadiens last Saturday drew just 300 people, compared with 21,000 who went through the turnstiles to cheer on the team.
But the tension can be seen as a reaction to demographic trends that show no sign of reversing. A low birth rate, the flight of francophone families to suburbs off the island of Montreal and an influx of immigrants have combined to produce a steady decrease in the proportion of francophones living in the city.
Marc Termote, a demographer at the Université de Montréal, has been using census data to project linguistic trends for 20 years, and he says it is inevitable that francophones will be reduced to a minority on the island of Montreal. He sees the percentage of francophones, which stood at 54% in the 2006 census, falling below 50% by 2021. It’s not that the anglophone community is growing — it has shrunk steadily since 1971, stabilizing in the last census at about 25% on the island.
It is the population of allophones, those whose mother tongue is neither French nor English, that is growing. And as Montreal becomes less French, immigrants — the vast majority of whom settle in the city — will be less motivated to integrate into francophone society, Mr. Termote says.

Mario Beaulieu talks to journalists during a gathering to protest Bill 103 in Montreal in October 2010. Bill 103, meant to replace Bill 104 which was struck down by the Supreme Court, would allow students to move into the publicly funded English school system after spending at least three years in an English private school.

Bill 101, Quebec’s language law, can regulate the language on signs, require the children of immigrants to attend French school and ensure workers can work in French, but its reach stops at people’s doorsteps. “In my opinion, it’s an illusion to think we can change these trends,” Mr. Termote said. “We cannot force anglophones to leave Quebec. We cannot prevent francophones on the island of Montreal from moving to the suburbs. We cannot say that from now on we will only help francophones have children.… It’s often the illusion of politicians that they have a kind of power. I would love to be proven wrong, but unfortunately there are things that we cannot change.”
Of course, that will not stop politicians from trying. The Parti Québécois is proposing to extend Bill 101’s schooling provision, which now requires children of immigrants to attend French school, to cover the pre-university colleges know as CEGEPs. Last month the PQ proposed sending the immigrants themselves to school, obliging them to learn French and pass a government test to prove it.
The Liberal government is not proposing such drastic steps, but it has displayed concern about a perceived abundance of English. In addition to criticizing the Canadiens’ coaching move, Christine St-Pierre, the minister responsible for language, came out in favour of banning English in the schoolyards of the Commission scolaire de Montréal. When Jean-Marc Fournier, the Justice Minister, received a single complaint about his practice of speaking in French and English at the beginning of his news conferences, he immediately ended the practice, reverting to just French.
As chief executive of the Caisse de dépôt, a potent symbol of francophone financial power, Michael Sabia has been at the eye of the language storm. In an interview, he told the National Post employing senior executives unable to speak French created a problem, because it meant some employees beneath them were forced to work in English. Quebec law protects an employee’s right to work in French. (The two Caisse executives have been enrolled in intensive French immersion.)
An anglophone born in Ontario, Mr. Sabia said he is particularly sensitive to the Caisse’s role in developing French-speaking business leaders. And he appreciates the Caisse’s place as an institution that helped end Quebec’s dependence on English-speaking financial institutions.
The uproar over the use of French at the Caisse has not led to a witch-hunt for anglophones elsewhere, he said. At least, he disagreed with that characterization.
“This is an issue that goes deeply into the history of Quebec, into people’s views about how Quebec ought to evolve,” he said. “It frankly touches issues about Quebec’s role in the world, Quebec’s capacity to prosper in that world. I mean this is really important stuff. And I worry sometimes that in English Canada, it can be misperceived.”
As president of the Montreal Board of Trade, it is practically part of Michel Leblanc’s job description to paint a rosy picture of the business climate in Montreal. He perceives the current debate as part of Quebec’s constant search for the proper linguistic balance, and sure enough, he sees a positive side.
None of the complaints about English at the Caisse and other Quebec companies would be happening if Quebec Inc. had not gone global, he said, where the language of business is English.
“If our companies were not trying to expand across North America, or to do business with India and China, or to set up in Brazil, we would have a much less strong economy, but we would not have this present debate,” he said.
“The public has to be satisfied with balance between use of French in companies because it’s the language of Quebec and the use of English in everything concerning international needs. That is where a balance has to be found.”
Cooler heads can see that English is no longer the enemy. Demographic trends show that Montreal’s anglophone community is caught in the same slide as the francophones on the island. The news this week was about the English Montreal School Board deciding to close three schools because of declining enrollment. Mr. Dorval of the Conseil du Patronat said people trying to turn language into a political issue are stuck in the past. “In the 1970s, the big debate was about affirmation for the Quebec people, being able to control the economy, protecting the French language and so forth. There was a political reason,” he said. “Now English should not be seen as a threat to your identity.”
National Post, with files from Nicolas Van Praet
ghamilton@nationalpost.com