By BILL TIERNEY
This is my 54th column and I have not yet written about language.
I have written about many other things, often nowhere near as important in our lives as language. I have even written about gender, twice, which is a more potentially explosive topic, but not a word about language. And yet we think about it all the time. It is central to our lives in Quebec. It is at the heart of our Canadian story. I have lived my whole adult life in a Quebec where language has been a battlefield.
I am even asking these questions in my head in both official languages. And I am anxious about the outcomes for both cultures. That, too, is part of being a Quebecer.
Language is always the elephant in our room. It is our "anxiety about the unknown, about the future," as Kurt Wallander, Henning Mankell's Swedish detective, describes the feelings we all have about the effects of demographic change, notably of falling birthrates and immigration. Will our children be able to function in a new language order? Will we still belong after the demographics change? Will the institutions which I need to live be able to survive? Will it be possible, for example, to publish an English newspaper? Will our English school commissions be able to thrive in a post-Bill 101 world? And, for another close example, will English CEGEPs survive if the PQ blocks francophones and allophones from having access?
Language can be a pretty scary subject. And language in Ste. Anne de Bellevue is no exception.
An example: in the last mandate, after much discussion, council decided to advertise the town by putting up separate banners in English and French on boulevard des Anciens Combattants (not, you'll notice, referred to as Veterans' Boulevard). Our consultants thought up a bunch of slogans in French and English to go with glossy images of the boardwalk, the restaurants, our athletes, our families and so on. The banners were installed. Within days the Office de la langue francaise contacted us to tell us we were breaking the law: we were not allowed to put up signs in English. And, at the same time, we were led to understand that the complaint that stimulated their intervention had come from one of our own town councillors.
We found a compromise solution. We just kept words that worked in both languages on the English banners. We identified the words that unite us, not the words that divide us. And I tried to pass the message to council that the time for objecting was not after the discussion, the vote and the implementation and certainly not to the Office de la langue francaise that, by the way, also later found fault with certain internal communications in the town.
Ste. Anne, they discovered, wasn't a perfectly French town, which brings me to the municipality's official language status, which is French, even if a slight majority of the population uses English at home.
In 2002, we found ourselves bizarrely merged into a borough with Ste. Genevieve and Ile Bizard because we had French status and could thus not be merged with our immediate neighbours, and logical partners, Kirkland, Senneville, Baie d'Urfe and Beaconsfield.
And if we had petitioned for bilingual status before the language law changes in 2001, we would have had a good case for a change. But the post-2001 language law restricts bilingual status to towns with a majority of mother-tongue speakers, not language users. If you don't have a majority of mother-tongue speakers, you can't get bilingual status.
In the 1980s, when I was first elected as a town councillor, there were considerably more francophones in Ste. Anne. But the young members of those big French families moved away to the close suburbs just off island. They became part of the "urban sprawl" problem.
Gradually the number of households using English as a means of communication grew to be a slight majority, which my 2005-9 council found a bit of a shock when I presented them with the statistics. In fact, a mayor of one of the other demerged towns wrote suggesting that we had potentially reasonable grounds for a legal action to demand bilingual status.
If Ste. Anne had demanded bilingual status before legal requirements were modified, we could have become officially bilingual.
So, why didn't we demand a change of status before 2001?
I shall try to explain next week.
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Bill Tierney is the former mayor of Ste. Anne de Bellevue.
_ billtierney@videotron.ca