The day that the Supreme Court of Canada struck down Quebec's Bill 104 restricting admission to English schools, the chairs of the two English school boards most affected by the judgment wrote to Premier Jean Charest.
The English Montreal's Angela Mancini and the Lester B. Pearson's Marcus Tabachnick said it was "crucial" that they meet with the premier "soon," before the government introduced any new restrictions, to discuss their possible implications.
That was last October. As the chairs of the province's largest English school boards, Mancini and Tabachnick are arguably the leading elected representatives of the English-speaking community specifically.
And Charest seems to find time to meet with every minor foreign official who's passing through. Yet not only has the premier's office ignored their request, the boards say it hasn't even bothered to acknowledge receipt of their letter.
An unfortunate oversight? More likely it was a deliberate snub, considering the previous insults to the English-speaking community by Charest over the seven years that he has been premier.
These insults include the under-representation of anglophones in his cabinet, his cavalier dismissals of English-speaking ministers he has had, his avoidance of Quebec anglophone audiences, and his government's neglect of the particular concerns of the English-speaking community.
Maybe it's because Charest feels a need to compensate because he's a closet anglophone baptized John James who made the politically unwise choice of settling in Westmount when he arrived in provincial politics from Ottawa without authentic nationalist credentials.
But previous Liberal leaders who started out with reserves of nationalist credibility didn't show Charest's open disdain for his party's most loyal supporters.
In fact, anglos are so loyal that instead of being rewarded for it, they are punished. Charest knows that as long as the alternative to a Liberal government is one formed by the Parti Québécois, his party doesn't need to worry about losing non-francophone seats.
In a recent Léger Marketing-Le Devoir poll, a majority of non-francophones (56 per cent) expressed dissatisfaction with the Charest government. But 61 per cent of non-francophones said they would vote Liberal anyway.
Since Charest has snubbed them, the two Montreal English school boards are trying to gain community support in hopes of putting pressure on the government, or at least on English-speaking Liberal cabinet ministers and members of the National Assembly.
Their argument is that the vitality of the English-speaking community is threatened. But they have failed to get the support of the other English boards. And after more than a month, their online petition has received fewer than 11,000 signatures, the equivalent of less than one parent's signature for every four pupils in their schools.
The government seems more concerned about English-language opinion outside the province than inside, and avoiding a prolonged language controversy between French Quebec and English Canada that threatens national unity and benefits the PQ.
In response to the Supreme Court ruling, it's expected to rush legislation through the Assembly in the minimum required four weeks before the summer recess is scheduled to begin June 11.
And it's believed that the legislation will not require a "notwithstanding" clause overriding constitutional rights. If so, then the government has rejected a PQ proposal to restrict admission to unsubsidized English schools as well as subsidized ones.
Instead, it would allow a pupil to transfer to a subsidized English school after a number of years in a fully private elementary one - but only one of the latter that is well-established, such as Lower Canada College or the Study or most of the other 23 member institutions in the Quebec Association of Independent Schools.
Meanwhile, the chairs of the province's two largest English school boards will still be waiting for Charest to reply to their letter.