[JHikka]

Shifting this discussion to here...

Quebec’s anglophone minority is a target, once again – and no one is coming to the rescue
Andrew Coyne
May 19, 2021

"In his last piece before retirement, the veteran Montreal Gazette columnist Don Macpherson warned his English-speaking readers they were on their own.

Simply put, “we don’t count,” he told them. No political party, federal or provincial, is going to defend their rights. Not when they are outnumbered seven to one by the province’s French-speakers, and not when that majority has convinced itself that it is the endangered minority in the province.

Hence the great quiet that has descended upon Quebec in the wake of Bill 96, the Coalition Avenir Québec government’s draconian new language law, whose aim, whatever Premier François Legault’s dissembling (“it’s nothing against the English Quebeckers”), is to further harass and marginalize the province’s anglophone minority – in the name, as always, of assuring the “survival” of its francophone majority, or in the now-obligatory usage, the Quebec nation.

The bill would extend the restrictions on English contained in Bill 101 – the province’s existing assertion of franco-supremacy – to businesses with as few as 25 employees. It would not ban English altogether on commercial signs, as some hard-liners had hoped, but it restores the requirement of “marked predominance” for French, a phrase familiar from previous instalments of the language wars.

It would remove the right to offer bilingual services from some municipalities, cap enrolment at English-speaking CEGEP schools, force recent immigrants to communicate with the province exclusively in French and empower citizens to snitch to the government on businesses whose French-language service they found wanting.

Once, this sort of thing might have provoked at least a murmur of opposition here and there, on the principle that majorities should not be quite so open in their disdain for the minorities in their midst. Not any more. In part, this is a matter of precedent – what might once have been the occasion for outrage has long been sanctioned by custom. But in part it is the crude calculations of politics: There are no votes in anglo rights.

...

Having earlier invoked the clause with regard to Bill 21, and gotten away with it – a Quebec Superior Court judge last month found the legislation, which imposes an effective hiring bar on observant religious minorities across much of the public sector, was a gross violation of religious rights, only to wave it through helplessly – the Legault government seems likely to get away with it again. As before, it is not only the federal Charter of Rights and Freedoms it has thus neutered, but also Quebec’s own charter. Both are increasingly dead letters in the province."

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opin...and-no-one-is/