AM Pfffft! That's the sound of a damp squib, an expression that describes the protest demo against Bill 115 held outside Premier Jean Charest's Montreal office on Monday by a nationalist coalition with more than 1 million members. Fewer than 1,000 diehards showed up.
Even the wildly-inflated figure of 5,000 claimed by the organizers is anemic compared with the up to 60,000 who marched two weeks earlier in Quebec City for the return of the Nordiques hockey team.
The failure of the anti-115 coalition's "broad mobilization" shows that tactically, if not morally, Charest made the right decision by rushing his language legislation through the Assembly before many people noticed it. Unless, that is, the public apathy toward the legislation is so great that he needn't have bothered.
Bill 115 hardly justified the escalating shrillness of the Parti Quebecois's attempts to draw attention to it by exaggerating its effects on the status of French.
Like the undemocratic manner in which it was adopted, the new law itself is an expression of the cynicism of an aging government.
It appears to offer parents a way around the restrictions on admission to English public schools, but then all but closes that way off, deterring them from even trying to use it.
The Liberals argue that the law doesn't allow parents to buy the right to English public schooling for their children. And they're right, in the sense that there's no guarantee that the parents would get what they would have meant to pay for.
The key to Bill 115 is the regulation accompanying it ( snipurl.com/1bk69h).
Ostensibly, the law itself allows a child to become eligible to transfer to an English public school after three years' attendance at an unsubsidized one, to which the restrictions don't apply.
But the child's application also has to be awarded at least 15 points by the education department, under a system set down in the six-page regulation.
So parents will have to decide whether it's worth gambling three years of their child's schooling -and three years of tuition fees at a fully private school -on a chance to win admission to an English public school.
And what the Liberals want those parents to understand is that they'll be playing a shell game that's rigged against them.
The major factor in the points system is the type of private English school the parents have chosen for their child and his or her brothers and sisters.
But after they choose the school, it can be dropped, from one year to the next, if its enrolment changes, to a lower classification for which fewer points are awarded.
Also, up to eight points can be deducted for a subjective assessment of the child's commitment to an English education. The Liberals make it no secret that their purpose is to accept as few applicants as possible.
And to further discourage applications, the Liberals are receiving the unwitting help of the PQ, which has vowed to repeal Bill 115 once it comes to power. The president of the Quebec English School Boards Association, Debbie Horrocks, says Bill 115 will not result in a single new pupil being admitted to an English public school system which needs "vital oxygen."
It's the interests of the exclusive English private schools, not the public ones, that have been protected by a government for the well-connected and the well-heeled. It rejected the PQ's proposal to restrict admission to the unsubsidized schools, so they can go on legally selling English schooling for five-figure fees.
The government did, however, award the English public schools a small consolation prize. Last month, Charest appointed Geoffrey Kelley as "the second parliamentary assistant" to the education minister, responsible for "files affecting the Englishspeaking community."
Kelley is one of the quiet quartet of English-speaking Liberal MNAs who voted for Bill 115 without speaking in the Assembly.
The English school-board chairs still can't get in the front door to speak to Education Minister Line Beauchamp about their declining enrolment. But now they can go around to the side door to see the second parliamentary assistant.
Such is the influence of the "anglophone lobby" that PQ leader Pauline Marois blamed for Bill 115.