It remains to be seen whether the report on Quebec's Englishspeaking minority released last week by the [Senate's official languages committee->35893] will make much of a difference, but it is a noble and welcome effort in aid of a community that is more typically either disdained or taken for granted.
Nearly two years in the making and backed by fact-finding visits to the main anglo population centres in the province, the report calls on the federal government to do a better job protecting the rights of the anglophone population. There was a time when such a call could reasonably have been dismissed as superfluous - and some still believe that to be the case. But the anglo population isn't what it was in its heyday, which has been over for some decades now.
It's true that English Quebecers are a relatively fortunate lot, perhaps even the besttreated minority in the world, as the standing cliché in francophone circles has it. But the community's stark reality, as opposed to the persistent myth of a privileged elite, is that Quebec anglophones now lag behind francophones in median income (even though they are on average better educated), suffer a higher unemployment rate in all regions, and are more likely than francophones to be under the low-income threshold.
For anglophones there is a shortage of access - particularly in regions beyond Montreal where four fifths of the anglo population is concentrated - to schools, health services, vocational training and cultural resources.
The number of Quebecers whose first language is English has declined by 40 per cent since the 1970s. That remaining population is rapidly aging, and the exodus of young anglophones during the 1970s and '80s created a "missing middle" - a scarcity of the generation that normally assumes responsibility for the care of elderly parents.
Remedies proposed by the report include improvements in funding for community organizations and maintaining closer tabs on federal transfer payments for activities intended to benefit the anglo population. It urges federal institutions to address problems such as access to employment, business development and job-training services.
What's also needed is an attitudinal shift. Much as anglophones have adapted to the fact of the dominance of French in Quebec and largely taken on what francophones once complained of as the burden of bilingualism, the committee found that anglophones in communities across the province still feel a sense of exclusion from Quebec society.
It should be recognized by all, as the report proposes, that the English-speaking community is an asset, not a detriment, to Quebec society, and that its promotion should not be perceived as a threat to the aspirations of the francophone majority.
It's time for common sense and compassion to trump atavistic myths and hostilities.