Rights? What Rights?

While I was gone, the language debate flared up yet again.  Immigrants (and also those Canadians who were educated outside of Canada in English or inside Canada in French) are not eligible for the English school system in Quebec (K-11, no 12).  There was a loophole that going briefly to private school in English would allow a kid to go to an English public school, but was closed by bill 104 (funnily enough, passed between the time I took the job here and when I arrived).  Bill 104 was tossed out recently by the Canadian Supreme Court.  Why?  In part, there is something about parents having the rights to choose their kid's language of education.  So, the debate in Quebec has now focused on how to remedy the situation since the Court said that Quebec had to figure out a replacement.  

So, of course, the PQ and various government bodies stocked with partisans have advocated eliminating any possibility for immigrants to send their kids to any private school (our solution).  This is strange since the Court ruled already:

This legislative response seems excessive in relation to the seriousness of the identified problem and its impact on school clientele and, potentially, on the situation of the French language in Quebec," wrote Justice Louis LeBel in the judgment. "The absolute prohibition on considering an educational pathway in a (unsubsidized private school) seems overly drastic."

The PQ and other nationalists want to pass another law that the Court would reject, and then invoke a strange Canadian process--the notwithstanding clause. This is a process by which the national parliament or any provincial assembly can decide by a simple majority vote that they can ignore the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.  Which really means that the Charter is not worth that much if it can be so easily by-passed.

[It figures, by the way, that something that so confounds the English language (literally and symbolically) involved Jean Chretien.]

They are really just looking to provoke a crisis to energize their base.

 It is likely that the provincial Liberals, the party in power in Quebec, will cave into the language hawks because the Anglophones and the immigrants have no other place to go.  

And then what?  I would hope that eight years of education in Quebec in English would give my daughter some grandfathering, but who knows?  I just hope the process plays out slowly enough that we do not have to sue or flee.  But those would be our options, as putting my daughter in to a French public school in 9th grade would be pretty damaging to her chances of getting the grades she would otherwise earn to get into the US colleges that she may be interested in. [Yes, she can read and write in French, but she is not perfectly fluent.  Plus her teachers would almost certainly only communicate to her parents in French.  So much for oversight.]

It reminds me of my daughter's response when she was eight or so and spotted a piece in the paper I had written about Quebec separatism.  Upon learning what that meant, her instant reaction was: "we would move to Ontario, right."  Um, yes.  Given the current job market, my response to a referendum would be moving out of Quebec somewhere.  My response to a revision of the educational system would be slightly less drastic--I would stay at McGill but we might have to move to just across the border of Quebec--Cornwall?  Holy long commutes, Batman!