Just in time for yesterday's St. Jean Baptiste Day celebrations, Parti Quebecois leader Pauline Marois has laid out her roadmap to an independent Quebec.
The trip, as mapped out at the PQ's meeting last weekend, will be slow and quite indirect. The destination label on the front of the bus won't actually say "Independence." But when the time is "appropriate," Marois said, her PQ government will hold a third referendum on sovereignty.
Until the time is deemed right for that glorious day and to hasten that divisive vote, Marois and her party have cooked up an agenda consisting largely of tactics apparently designed principally to stir up controversy and ill feeling. "Enacting" something called "Quebec citizenship," and something called a "Quebec constitution" would only divert government energy -and money, no doubt -away from Quebec's real problems. Similarly pressing demands for a single income tax form -and telling Ottawa "don't worry, we'll give you your share" -is another false priority. So are the plans to demand sole jurisdiction over culture and communications, immigration, and economic development.
(Actually we wish them luck with the constitution idea. That debate alone could, with luck, become a sinkhole to divide and confuse separatist councils for many years.)
Aside from these sideshows, however, the PQ does also have some plans, as usual, for more restrictions on English in education. The interesting thing about these plans is that having constrained actual anglophones as tightly as the Supreme Court will allow, the PQ is now turning to constraining freedom of choice even further for francophones, as well. This is a decision which we hope the party will regret, strongly and soon.
From family-based daycares (seriously) to CEGEP, the PQ now has big plans to control access. The Liberal government is choking off, with Bill 103, a trickle of non-Canadian anglophone students into the province's English high schools, but that's not good enough. The PQ now wants to require even family daycares to provide French to toddlers. And only students who have graduated from Englishlanguage high schools would be allowed to attend English-language CEGEPs. No longer would young francophones and allophones be able to exercise freedom of choice in language of education for the first time in their lives.
The PQ's aim is apparently to prevent allophone students from switching over to anglophone schooling as soon as they are legally eligible to do so. But by limiting English CEGEPs to graduates of English high schools, the PQ will, we believe, also alienate the thousands of French-speaking students who now choose English CEGEPs, and others who want the right to choose.
Marois has promised French-speakers a one-term English "immersion" course in French CEGEP, as if that would mollify the young adults who want to be able to take charge of their own future and learn a second language their own way.
For now, the PQ has spared universities from their mania for controlling access, but it can only be a matter of time before their zealotry reaches that level, too.
Hacking away at freedom of choice and stirring up imaginary issues; this is the PQ's recipe for sovereignty. But you don't have to be anglophone or allophone to ask the obvious question: Who would want to live in a country run by people who think this way?