A French-Canadian case against an independent Quebec (for now)
The provincial election for Quebec is set for the fall of 2026, and things are not looking good for the governing Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ), who are staring down the barrel of a loaded gun in the form of an electorate dissatisfied with their conservative neoliberal policies and energized with nationalist fervour. At the time of writing, poll aggregator 338 Canada projects a complete ousting of the CAQ from the Assemblée Nationale in favour of a Parti Québécois (PQ) majority government. A péquiste government means yet another independence referendum may be on the table, and many young people are excited. As a French-Canadian who is not Québécois, I have my suspicions regarding the separatist movement. While I sympathize and can imagine a world where an independent Quebec is a force for good, I believe that trends in the province’s language policy reveal a disquieting trend in the independence movement.
One of the movement’s main stated motivations is the protection and preservation of French-Canadian culture, including the French language. This is not in itself a blameworthy goal. Still, it begs the following question: What is French-Canadian culture, who is included in Québécois identity, and who is excluded from it? Understandably, a linguistic and cultural minority in any society might feel threatened. Indeed, French-Canadians have faced discrimination and systematic disadvantage for much of Canada’s history, especially in rural areas. Before the Quiet Revolution, Anglo-Canadians were economically dominant even in Quebec, and the KKK’s Canadian operations included attacks on French Canadians, rooted both in anti-Catholic sentiment and anti-French-Canadian sentiment. While overt Francophobia in English Canada has waned, the country’s history of suppressing French and its ongoing indifference toward Quebec’s grievances make the separatist impulse understandable. Still, I’m skeptical of the motives behind today’s dominant strain of separatism. The French language is constantly portrayed as a damsel in distress – a language in need of rescuing and protecting. Consequently, the provincial government has been repeatedly mobilised, and Quebec maintains a language control board, l’Office Québécois de la Langue Française (OQLF), to ensure that the French language is not encroached upon, but also to maintain its standardization. You may recognize the OQLF from a /60 Minutes/ segment that dubbed it the “language police,” despite its lack of policing powers. In this, I find the first inkling of a contradiction. While language standardization can be an important tool in the preservation of minoritised languages, it can quickly become a tool of oppression and linguistic discrimination. This usually depends on how standardization is used.
How does the OQLF use its powers? For one, it seems strongly opposed to the use of loan words from English. For example, the OQLF wrote to the Société de Transport de Montréal (STM) six times during last season’s NHL playoffs to get them to display “Allez! Canadiens, Allez!” instead of “Go! Habs, Go!” on their buses to avoid the use of an anglicisme.
Anglicismes, the nightmares of French teachers everywhere, are, in my experience, an ill-defined class of linguistic behaviours that get associated with the influence of English at the lexical and structural levels. I cannot count the number of times I’ve heard someone being scolded for using such constructs as “je regarde la television” instead of “j’écoute la television.” In the example mentioned previously, the Director-General even openly acknowledged that “go” can be found in French dictionaries, but maintained that it was still an anglicisme and thus not conformant to the OQLF’s standards for “exemplary” use of French. Even the PQ found this to be ludicrous, which is somewhat comforting.
This kind of linguistic prescriptivism is worrying, though some might argue it’s simply a defensive response to fears of English assimilation. To test this argument, one should ask what attitudes these ‘defenders’ hold towards non-Québécois and especially non-prestige varieties of French. Surely, the consistent position to take would be to defend linguistic diversity and champion the value of even the most stigmatized varieties of French.
At the individual level, a quick look online suggests that, while the average Franco-Québecor has a neutral to positive opinion of, for example, Acadien—a variety of French spoken primarily in New Brunswick—it is common to hear Acadiens express that they frequently experience condescension and get told that it’s “nice of them to try to speak French” when they visit Quebec. At the institutional level, it’s clear that the OQLF prizes a view of French that sees any sort of difference from the “exemplary” French as a degeneration. Just a few weeks ago, the Quebec government announced that it would not permit the gender-neutral pronoun “iel” or gender-inclusive written forms of words such as “toustes” (a portmanteau of “tous” and “toutes”) and “un.e” in official uses of French. Is French really so fragile?
Combined with other policies such as the out-of-province tuition hikes at anglophone universities, the requirement to provide proof of French language competence to attend French language universities for those educated outside of Quebec, and its racist bans on religious symbols such as hijabs and turbans in publicly funded jobs, it is clear that there is at least a contingent of separatists that are not actually interested in the well-being of French-Canadians. They seek to redefine Canadian francophonie as being solely composed of Quebec, and a white Quebec at that. I am not fundamentally opposed to Quebec separatism, but I have my hangups. So long as the mainstream separatist movement does not disavow in word and deed racist Quebec nationalists, I can only assume that they agree with them. Until then, I must be firmly against independence.