Maxime Bernier has never had to line up in the dead of the night in York region or in Squamish, B.C., to grab a spot for a child in an early French immersion class.
If he had, the former Conservative minister would know first-hand that the option to choose to have one’s child educated in one rather than the other of the country’s official languages is no more absolute elsewhere in Canada than it is in Quebec.
In the matter of second-language schooling, supply is left to the discretion of school boards and provincial governments that can turn off the taps as they see fit.
In many provinces, demand routinely exceeds supply and in some — such as New Brunswick, which moved to do away with early French immersion three years ago — government policy is sometimes at odds with parental wishes.
Outside Quebec, the only children who have a constitutional right to a French-language education are those born to parents whose mother tongue is French and/or who were educated in that language in Canada.
But even that right is not absolute as it can be fully exercised only in areas where the number of minority-language children is high enough to justify the service.
Some French-language schools outside Quebec accept small numbers of bilingual English-speaking students. But none is under an obligation to do so.
Minority-language schools are not a substitute for immersion classes and the Supreme Court has ruled that to be entitled to have their children attend the former, parents must meet the requirements set out in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
When it comes to minority-language education, Quebec’s English-language community enjoys the same rights as francophone minorities in the rest of Canada.
In practical terms, the main differences are in the margin of the system.
In the rest of Canada, francophone immigrants have the option of sending their children to French-language schools. In Quebec, immigrants must go to school in French until the end of high school.
If Quebec dropped its language restrictions tomorrow, as Bernier would have it do, the vast majority of its students would still be getting their English-language training in the province’s French school system — just as most English-speaking students in the rest of Canada rely on their local schools to equip them with French-language skills.
It is not Bill 101 that is preventing many francophone Quebecers from becoming more bilingual but rather a limited supply of teaching expertise and a local environment that is not always conducive to practising a second language.
Those are hurdles familiar to many parents outside Quebec who are striving to raise bilingual children in an overwhelmingly English-speaking environment.
In spite of those limitations, Quebec does a better job than any other province in turning out bilingual (and trilingual) graduates.
That is a token of the fact that in North America the power of attraction of English is significantly greater than that of French.
Before Bill 101, 80 per cent of newcomers to Quebec bypassed the French education system to attend school in English. A majority did not become fluent enough to function in French.
More than 30 years after the advent of Bill 101, it is still possible to live in Montreal without using more than a sprinkling of French.
Every year, scores of graduates leave Montreal’s McGill or Concordia with a fine degree but little more proficiency in French than when they started university.
There is more than nationalist ideology at play in the widespread Quebec consensus that legislative measures are essential to ensure that French be sustained as the common public language of the province.
Like every other industrialized society, Quebec is increasingly relying on immigration to tend its social safety net in the face of a declining birth rate and an aging population.
Would Bernier have francophone Quebecers learn more English so that they can communicate with the doctors, the nurses, the teachers and the social workers of tomorrow?