Some 3,000 people attended a Saturday-night rally to "protect the French language" by tightening still further Quebec's restrictions on language choice. The event demonstrated the power -and the weakness -of the nationalist hardliners who strive incessantly to manipulate public opinion on language.

The Gazette September 21, 2010 Everyone in Quebec understands that francophones are strongly attached to French and eager to protect it from encroachment by English, which dominates this continent and, increasingly, the world. That vigilance is, we think, entirely natural and reasonable. This newspaper accepts fully the notion that Bill 101, the 1977 Charter of the French Language, was by being good for French, also good for Canadian unity.
The position and role of French in Quebec have stabilized and grown stronger since 1977, but sovereignist hardliners have never stopped rediscovering that French is in danger. There was plenty of that Saturday at the Centre Pierre Charbonneau. One orator declared that "Bill 101 is not for sale," as if the Liberal government's Bill 103, a narrow-spirited attempt to skirt a Supreme Court ruling cementing up a very small access route to English schools -a route left open in the original Bill 101 -amounted to the revocation of the whole Charter.
The emotion-generating machine was in high gear. La Presse Canadienne reported that PQ MNA Pierre Curzi recited Michele Lalonde's 1960s poem Speak White. We expected Curzi to be lying low just now, after his much-mocked Canadiens paranoia attack, but there he was. In any case "speak white" is not an expression one hears much in Quebec these days -except at sovereignist rallies.
Mario Beaulieu, president of Montreal's Societe St. Jean Baptiste, told the crowd that French must be the common language of all Quebecers. "This is essential to build a society that is inclusive, coherent and united," he said, in a novel use of the word "inclusive."
This event was jointly planned by no fewer than 30 organizations, and it included some fairly high-powered entertainment -Daniel Boucher, Michel Rivard, Loco Locass, Marie-Denise Pelletier, and les Zapartistes. So it was interesting that a claimed crowd of 3,000 was the best they could do. Perhaps Bill 103 is not as universally hated among francophones as these hardliners want us to believe.
Of course, nobody organizes rallies for anglophones worried about the survival of their school system. Nor are there rallies for francophone parents who would like to be able to choose the school-language environment they consider best for their children.