What’s a young, bilingual lawyer who could be working anywhere in the country doing leading a “Canadian” party in this fall’s Quebec election?

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Colin Standish sums up his reasons as 21, 40 and 96. 

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The numerals identify controversial pieces of legislation affecting language and minority rights in the province that were introduced by François Legault’s incumbent Coalition Avenir Québec government over the last three years. 

Standish, 36, says he saw the adoption of the laws and what he and other critics call a wishy-washy or fickle response from the Quebec Liberal Party as his wake-up call to re-engage in the language debate after a six-year absence.

“The Liberal Party of Quebec has thrown the basic human rights of English-speakers and minorities under the bus,” Standish said during a stop in downtown Montreal this summer to introduce a batch of candidates for his Canadian Party of Quebec (CaPQ).

“That’s my perception. They’ve been failing for 60 years, not just the past four years.”

His decision to run in the provincial election didn’t feel like a choice, he added. “It’s been a compulsion, and it’s felt a bit like running into a burning barn to save the horses.”

The CaPQ was launched in June as an offshoot of the Task Force on Linguistic Policy, which Standish co-founded in 2021 to denounce the Legault government’s Bill 96 and the federal Liberal government’s plans to tighten French-speaking requirements for businesses operating under federal jurisdiction in Quebec.

Acquiescence is no longer an option, Standish has repeated. It’s the kind of fiery talk that draws comparisons to another protest party that once defended English-minority rights: the defunct Equality Party.

“To acquiesce to 96, 21 and 40,” he said, “is to acquiesce to your own oblivion, to your own extinction in this province.”

The sweeping Bill 96, which amends the Charter of the French Language, known as Bill 101, does things like curtail access to government services in English, require private businesses and municipalities to serve clients in French under pain of financial penalty and permit government inspectors to carry out searches and seizures in businesses without warrants. The Legault government pre-emptively invoked the notwithstanding clause to shield the law from constitutional challenges.

Bill 40, for which the government invoked closure to pass in the National Assembly, replaces elected school boards with service centres, which opponents argue infringes on the constitutional rights of the English-speaking community to control its school system.

Bill 21, Legault’s secularism law, bans certain public-sector employees, including teachers and police officers, from wearing religious symbols. As with Bill 96, his government pre-emptively invoked the notwithstanding clause to shield Bill 21 from constitutional challenges.

Standish rejects the comparison of his party to the Equality Party, which made its electoral breakthrough in 1989 when he was a toddler.

The CaPQ is not this generation’s “angryphone” outlet, he maintains, although former Equality Party leader Keith Henderson is a member of the CaPQ executive.

“We don’t see ourselves as Equality Party 2.0,” Standish said.

“We see ourselves as a new, constructive vision for post-Quiet Revolution Quebec.”

That vision is anchored in human rights, minority rights, bilingualism and reconciliation between Indigenous peoples in Quebec and non-Indigenous Quebecers, according to the party’s founding principles.

They include the belief that every Quebec resident, regardless of mother tongue and country or province of origin, should have the right to send their children to the school of their choosing.

Standish only returned to Quebec in 2021, settling in Cowansville, near his roots, with his North Vancouver-born partner, Laura Schober, and their cat, Stanley.

Standish had moved to Toronto in 2015 after an unsuccessful bid for the federal Liberal nomination in Compton-Stanstead riding in the Eastern Townships. In Toronto, he worked for a recruitment firm on Bay Street while earning a master of laws at Osgoode Hall. He was called to the bar this past July after articling with a law firm in Sherbrooke.

The move back to Quebec was prompted by Standish and Schober getting laid off from their jobs at the start of the pandemic. But he readily waded back into a political struggle that he had spent two decades engaged in before he left.

Standish is the quintessential Quebec anglo, insofar as such a thing exists.

A ninth-generation Quebecer, Colin Myles Standish entered the world the same way his ancestors did. He was born in the family home in the rural Townships.

The Standishes of yore fled New England and headed north with other Loyalists at the end of the American War of Independence in 1783. The first Myles Standish in the lineage to step foot on this side of the Atlantic had arrived with the Pilgrims on the Mayflower and led the militia at Plymouth Colony.

Standish’s mother is a contemporary American émigré.

Standish describes Cookshire, where he was born, as a one-horse town. He was one of six kids in his elementary school class. In 2002, the town was merged with surrounding municipalities and the resulting Cookshire-Eaton now boasts a population of 5,253.

His grandfather, Colin Alden Standish, was a member of the Royal Rifles of Canada and was captured in the fall of Hong Kong during the Second World War. He spent 1,377 days in Japanese prisoner of war camps and received the Distinguished Conduct Medal from the King of England for “gallant and distinguished services in the field.”

Standish is writing a book on his grandfather, the Battle of Hong Kong and the horror of the Japanese camps, and has travelled twice to Hong Kong for his research.

And although Colin Alden Standish has been gone for over 30 years, he accompanies his grandson everywhere. A photo on Standish’s smartphone shows his grandfather as a young PoW flanked by two other Quebec prisoners. They are bare-chested and emaciated, with only a cloth to cover their private parts.

But the issue of language rights was also a strong pull.

Standish says he grew up admiring the leaders of Quebec’s English-rights movement, notably William Johnson and Brent Tyler. He also relates a childhood memory of watching his father count piles of U.S. dollars that he had stashed in his office safe as emergency funds on the night of the 1995 referendum on Quebec sovereignty.

In his teens, the honours high school student joined Alliance Quebec and the Liberal Party of Canada. In his mid-20s, Standish served on the boards of the Townshippers’ Association, which promotes the concerns of the English-speaking community in the Eastern Townships, and the Voice of English-Speaking Quebec. Around the same period, from 2012 to 2015, he penned opinion pieces and open letters about language rights and multiculturalism that were published everywhere from the Montreal Gazette to the New York Times. His opinions got him invited to talk shows like Radio-Canada’s Tout le monde en parle.

By then, Standish had earned a bachelor of arts with honours from Queen’s University, where he was president of the Liberal association, and was studying for his first law degree in French at Université Laval, where he also edited the student-run law review.

Standish is a risk-taker, coming back to Quebec “to fight the good fight,” said Gerald Cutting, the former president of the Townshippers’ Association. “For a person of his age, he’s been remarkably courageous.”

However, the viability of a language rights party is open for debate.

“It’s not the same English-speaking community as it was,” said Jack Jedwab, president and CEO of the Association for Canadian Studies and the Metropolis Institute.

“My polls are showing a lot of anglophones are just tuned out. They don’t pay a lot of attention to politics, especially those under 55 years old.”

The English-speaking community is also more diverse than the generation for whom Bill 101 was a powerful symbol, Jedwab said. As well, many weren’t around at the time of Bill 101’s adoption either because they weren’t yet born or hadn’t yet arrived.

“Yes, there are a number of anglophones who are certainly and legitimately bothered by Bill 96,” Jedwab said. “But that sort of powerful symbolism doesn’t resonate the same way with this community of English-speakers.”

Standish, who has chosen to run for a seat in Westmount—St-Louis riding on the island of Montreal, can speak to both rural and urban English Quebec, he added.

“If you grew up in the city, you might not understand this,” Cutting said. “I’m an eighth-generation Townshipper. … I still have hayseeds in my hair. The ability to talk to a farmer about whatever he’s juggling with this year — it could be lack of water or it could be a variety of things. Colin grew up in that atmosphere.”

At the same time, having studied at Queen’s, Université Laval and Osgoode Hall, Standish “has that ability to switch quickly into a mode that would be appropriate for a more urban centre,” Cutting said.

Still, Jedwab notes that the CaPQ and another new protest party, Balarama Holness’s Bloc Montréal, are targeting the weakened opposition Quebec Liberals to build their base.

In 1989, the Equality Party was challenging a Quebec Liberal party that was in power and was threatening the Liberals’ ability to maintain the coalition of anglophones, allophones and francophones who were against Quebec sovereignty and who had contributed to the party’s electoral victory, he said.

That’s not what the new protest parties are doing today, Jedwab said. “They’re going after the same party, but they’re not going to in any way erode the government. They’re going to erode the Liberal Party.”

However, the CaPQ doesn’t see itself as a protest party, but as a movement to unify Quebecers, Standish said.

“It’s for English-speakers, French-speakers, newcomer and Indigenous,” he said. “We’re building that coalition to take back Quebec.”

Standish contends the Liberals, the Parti Québécois and now the CAQ have pitted Quebecers against each other for their own self-preservation and to the detriment of the province.

“The Quiet Revolution was stolen,” he said.

“We need to throw off these shackles of bureaucratic institutionalization, economic stagnation and social disharmony and discord that are artificial structures by a small, narcissistic, self-interested elite.”

The question is whether that message will be said inside the National Assembly.

lgyulai@postmedia.com