Graeme Hamilton, National Post - PQ leader Pauline Marois says that French is under threat if the province's Bill 101 is not enforced in daycares.
MONTREAL -- Parti Québécois leader Pauline Marois has seen the enemy, and he is crawling on all fours, babbling out his first words in a language other than French.
Not content to have Bill 101 language provisions apply to Quebec schoolchildren, Ms. Marois has come out in favour of forcing immigrant and francophone parents to send their children to French-language daycares.
She told the Presse Canadienne news service this week that French is in such a precarious state in Montreal that some "electroshocks" are needed. And under a PQ government, the state-subsidized network of $7-a-day daycare centres would be in line for a zap. "We should go more towards applying Bill 101 in child-care centres," the separatist leader said.
Quebec's language charter, aimed at preserving French in Quebec, currently requires francophones and immigrants to send their children to French school. The measure, in place for more than 30 years, has become widely accepted and has created a generation of immigrant children fluent in French.
But an influx of immigrants and an exodus of old-stock francophones to suburbs has led to a gradual decline in the proportion of Montrealers with French as their mother tongue, reaching 50% in the 2006 census. Ms. Marois accuses Jean Charest's Liberal government of standing by as French loses ground in the province's largest city. "If we do nothing, we are approaching the point of no return," she said.
Her comments have alarmed some early childhood educators, who have trouble seeing how Bill 101's strict provisions could be applied in a setting where many of the children have not yet learned to speak. Gina Gasparrini is executive director of a publicly subsidized, bilingual daycare in Montreal that looks after children as young as five months. She knows how hard the initial days and weeks in daycare can be for children. "Already they go through separation anxiety, and you're supposed to comfort them in a language they're not familiar with? It doesn't seem to make sense," she said.
"It's really scary to see we're trying to interject politics into the lives of very young children, of babies. If the goal of Bill 101 is to have all these children educated in French, what language they are exposed to in daycare will not change that."
Ms. Marois' comments come on the eve of a two-day party meeting in Montreal, at which questions of language and culture will be front and centre. Since her arrival as leader in 2007, Ms. Marois has been grooming her image as a language hawk. In the heat of the province's debate over reasonable accommodation of religious minorities, she introduced a bill that would have denied Quebec citizenship to immigrants unable to display a mastery of French, preventing them from running for office or making political donations. She even mused about forcing Montreal Canadiens players to learn French, after a lawyer complained that the team's captain at the time, a Finn, could not speak the language.
She first raised the idea of extending Bill 101 to daycares last year but had appeared to back off when the notion met with some ridicule. But the subject resurfaced this month in a discussion paper published by the party in advance of this weekend's meeting. One of the open-ended questions it asks is whether daycare centres should introduce "French-language requirements" for staff in their dealings with children. The headline on a subsequent column in The Gazette was, "What's French for goo-goo?"
Camil Bouchard, the PQ critic for immigration, said in an interview that the intention of the proposal is to require a mastery of French for daycare personnel, but it stops short of imposing Bill 101's restrictions on who can attend.
"We observed in studies on school preparedness that about 35% of kids going to school are not well-prepared for primary school," Mr. Bouchard said. "One approach for helping these kids to attend school with success would be to prepare them in French language usage, because the school is in French." He acknowledged that a proposal more in line with Ms. Marois' thinking could be presented from the floor.
Ms. Gasparrini disputed the idea that kindergarten is too late to begin mastering a language. "When they're five, and they go to school, they're at an age where it's very easy to learn languages," she said. "They learn quickly, and they adapt quickly."
With an election not expected for another three years, the party plans to finalize its program at a convention in 2011. The weekend meeting will also address the other end of the education spectrum, the pre-university colleges known as CEGEPs that Quebec teens attend after completing Grade 11. Bill 101 does not apply to CEGEPs, and some prominent sovereigntists, including former premier Bernard Landry, have said it is time to change that.
The PQ document notes that 40% of allophone students -- those whose mother tongue is neither French nor English -- switch to the English system for college. About four per cent of francophones do the same. "What measures should be taken so students coming from French high schools attend French CEGEPs?" the document asks. In her interview with Presse Canadienne, Ms. Marois declined to take a stance.
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National Post
ghamilton@nationalpost.com