One of the nation’s top junior hockey players, Zachary Bolduc, who plays for the Quebec Remparts, was not selected by Team Canada for this year’s World Championship. He responded by denouncing Hockey Canada’s discrimination against French-speaking Quebecers.

Ex-coach Michel Bergeron praised his bravery and agreed. In elite hockey, which is primarily played by Anglophones, “it’s always been this way and it’s always going to be this way,” added Bergeron.

At the same time, New Brunswick Premier Blaine Higgs stated that he was discriminated against as a monolingual Anglophone.

You don’t need to waste time wondering which of the two men is closer to the truth. In everyday life New AcadiaHiggs’ lawsuit was greeted as it should be, with a brick and a beacon. In the editorial officeFrançois Gravel established his inaccuracy by pointing out that a high percentage of civil servants and deputy ministers in the province are monolingual in English.

Luc Swanson, a Dieppe resident and federal official for more than 30 years, pointed out that in the four cities he worked in – Hull, Moncton, Saint John and Ottawa – 100% of his French-speaking colleagues were bilingual, which This was just 5% of its English speaking peers. “The very notion that Mr. Higgs could have been treated with injustice and discrimination is ridiculous,” Gravel concluded.

In 1951, 30% of Canada’s population was French-speaking. In 2021 it was 19%. Canadian Francophonie today numbers about 7 million people, 6.5 million of whom live in Quebec. Today, more than ever, these Francophones must resist the strong trend favoring English in Canada, North America and around the world. Their misfortune is that they are divided.

For example, in Quebec, who is concerned about the fate of the Acadian community, whose linguistic rights are currently being threatened by a prime minister like the eminent columnist Rino Morin Rossignol Described as “Lord Durham in trousers”. short “ ? Who in Francophonie outside of Quebec, mostly opposed to Quebec’s Separatist desires and often associated with Anglo-Quebec lobbies, supports our language laws?

In The Official Language Trap (north2022, 500 pages), a clever building block full of legal considerations, the Franco-Ontarian lawyer and essayist Éric Poirier explains in great detail that this sad division of French-speaking Canadians is the result of the trap set for them by Pierre Elliott Trudeau in 1969. with the Official Languages ​​Act.

By creating symmetry between the rights of French in Canada outside of Quebec and those of English in Quebec, Poirier writes, Trudeau sows a schism in Canadian Francophonie. The case is easy to understand. For example, if Quebec intends to restrict the right to study English to only historical Anglophones and the Supreme Court ratifies that decision, the same rule will apply to attendance at French schools in the rest of Canada, threatening their survival.

The same logic goes the other way. The expansion of access to French schools in Canada should also apply to access to English schools in Quebec. Result: Quebec and the Francophonie outside of Quebec behave like warring brothers in court. Meanwhile, French is in decline across Canada.

The preparatory documents for the new Official Language Act currently being discussed in Ottawa recognize that French must henceforth be protected throughout Canada, including in Quebec. Incorporating this observation into law would be a step forward. However, we must go further to defend French by forcing the Supreme Court to adopt an asymmetrical interpretation of language rights.

Constitutional changes along these lines, ie insisting on the need to see French advances in Quebec and Canada, are desirable but unlikely, Poirier concedes. As would a reform of the Supreme Court that would allow Quebec to appoint three of the nine justices, reserving one of its nine seats for the Francophonie outside of Quebec.

For Quebec, independence would be a solution to the problem, but it fails to rally Francophones outside of Quebec and rarely shows up on Quebec’s radar. Then what to do? Poirier proposes “a concerted plan of action between Quebec and the French minorities for a common position before the Supreme Court” that would aim to force the latter to base its decisions on the obvious: it’s French who need to be everywhere in Canada protected.

To see in the video