Are you a bad anglo because you failed L’actualité magazine’s “Marie-Mai” test of integration into Quebec society?
You’re in good company. So did Graham Fraser.
Few English-Canadians are as much a francophile as is Fraser, the federal commissioner of official languages. He spent 10 years in Quebec as a universally respected journalist for The Gazette and other publications. He still has strong ties to this province, spends a lot of time here, and closely follows Québécois media and culture.
Yet he confessed to me in an interview on Tuesday, “I don’t listen to Marie-Mai.”
He was commenting on the horrified discovery of Parti Québécois strategist Jean-François Lisée in L’actualité that 68 per cent of English-speaking Quebecers aged 18 to 34 had never heard of the Québécoise pop singer.
But Fraser said he doesn’t think that listening to Marie-Mai is a valid test of whether anglophones have integrated.
He is a rare public official willing to defend Quebec’s English-speaking community against attack, as he did in the interview.
“The English minority has adapted to an extraordinary degree” to changes in Quebec, he said.
“Sixty per cent of anglophones in Quebec are bilingual, and between 18 and 34 (years of age), it’s 80 per cent. That involves a dramatic transformation of a community that was, 40 years ago, very isolated and cut off from the francophone majority … and that transformation needs to be recognized.”
English-speaking Quebecers are often called Canada’s “best-treated minority.” But Fraser said the English-speaking community does not owe its institutions to “the generosity of the majority.”
“These were institutions that were built by this (anglophone) community, that exist because of this community, whether it’s McGill, Concordia, the English-language hospitals, the English-language services.”
The situation of the English-speaking community in Montreal cannot be compared with those of the smaller French-speaking communities in other provinces, he said.
“Any community, majority or minority, that has 600,000 people in a relatively concentrated area, as is the case of English Montrealers, is able to acquire a certain level of social, economic, political self-sufficiency, just by the concentration of numbers.”
Fraser said it would be “unfortunate” if Bill 101’s restrictions on admission to English primary and secondary schools were extended to the CEGEPs, as the PQ has proposed.
The proposal is in response to a recent decline in the proportion of francophones on the island of Montreal.
But Fraser said Montreal is not limited to the island. And changing the language that people speak at home “has never been, to the best of my knowledge” the objective of Quebec language policy, he said.
Referring to another recent concern, over the use of the bilingual greeting “Bonjour/hi” instead of the French-only “Bonjour” in downtown Montreal businesses, Fraser said it is “unfortunate when people feel that the presence of another language is an aggression.”
Fraser has what he calls “a theory” that French-speaking Quebecers became more insecure about their identity when the PQ temporarily fell to third place in the 2007 provincial election, which made it seem that the Québécois would remain a minority within Canada indefinitely.
But he said he is not sure I am right in positing that with the revival of linguistic nationalism, public anglo-bashing in the media, popular entertainment and politics has become socially acceptable again.
“Don’t forget: that streak of caricaturing English has deep roots,” he said, referring to negative stereotypes of English-speaking Quebecers. “I’m not sure that it has got worse.
“It may be – and you’re living here, and I’m not – that the (English-speaking) community has changed, and the attitudes (toward it) have not.”
dmacpherson@montrealgazette.com
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Twitter:@MacphersonGaz