Get out and vote
In Montreal, and in cities and towns across Quebec, municipal-election polling places are open from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. today. This is your chance to help decide who'll run your city.
You should have received a notice telling you where your polling station is. If not, consult the website election-montreal.qc.ca or the website of your own city or town.
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In the 32 years since Quebec's French Language Charter was passed, there have been periodic campaigns to strengthen its already potent provisions.
This fall, the Société Saint Jean Baptiste de Montréal, the SPQ Libre (Syndicalistes et progressistes pour un Québec libre) and the Mouvement Montréal français have combined forces to demand that the charter be extended to the province's CEGEP system. Allophone and francophone students should, these groups say, be required to continue their studies in French - no matter what their personal goals might be.
Even with former premier Bernard Landry's support, this cause should not, and will not, make any headway. French-speaking Quebecers, while naturally devoted to their language, want the freedom to choose between English and French at the CEGEP level.
CEGEP age is the right time for young people to make this choice. In today's global marketplace, depending on the career path a young person chooses, it would be shortsighted of anyone not to consider the need for more than one language.
Anglophone students, after years of French in primary and secondary school, study more French in CEGEP, and the great majority of them emerge effectively bilingual. Many francophones naturally want the same advantage.
The pressure to bring CEGEPs under Bill 101 provisions comes from a misunderstanding of how and why people adopt languages.
Landry says he and the original framers of the language charter were convinced that forcing allophones into the French primary- and secondary-school systems would result in their automatically choosing to go to college and university in French. They would become as French as Landry's own grandchildren - his view of an ideal result.
But other people stubbornly cling to their own wishes for their own futures, disappointing social engineers in the process.
The best thing Quebec's self-declared defenders of French could do for its continued survival is to ensure that it is taught well in primary and secondary schools - including English ones.
The real language scandal is how poorly too many of the province's French-language school graduates speak and write French, one of the world's most elegant languages.
A campaign for better instruction ... now, that's something everyone could get behind.