QCGN President Eva Ludvig explains that English- and French-speaking community associations and groups had been in agreement about what the modernization of the Official Languages Act stood for. “It’s when requests and demands from the Quebec government started being incorporated into it through amendments and through the latest version of the bill [that] things started to deteriorate”.
Federal Bill C-13 has two main purposes. The first is to modernize Canada’s Official Languages Act. The second is to enact the Use of French in Federally Regulated Private Businesses Act.
Many legal experts, including former Supreme Court Justice Michel Bastarache, have expressed discomfort with the Use of French in Federally Regulated Private Businesses Act. The Quebec Community Groups Network (QCGN) and many other voices from English-speaking Quebec are dead set against this.
The Liberal MPs who have spoken out against mention of the Charter of the French Language in Bill C-13 have undeservedly raised the ire of many in the French-language media, writes former QCGN president Marlene Jennings. Rather than accusing these MPs of spreading disinformation, critics “should focus their attention on the issues being raised.”
Columnist Michel C. Auger accuses the QCGN, Liberal MPs, and other community organizations advocating for English-speaking Quebecers of spreading misinformation about the Charter of the French Language amid the ongoing debate around the federal Bill C-13.
QCGN President Eva Ludvig thanks the Liberal MPs who “have been very courageous and taking political risk” by defending Quebec’s English-speaking during the study of Bill C-13.
Including references to Quebec’s Charter of the French Language within the federal government’s Bill C-13 sets a precedent for other provinces in the rest of Canada to use the notwithstanding clause to the detriment of francophone minority communities, warns QCGN President Eva Ludvig.
The QCGN is profoundly disappointed that the House of Commons Standing Committee on Official Languages has allowed references to Quebec’s Charter of the French Language to remain in proposed new federal language legislation to amend Canada’s Official Languages Act, reads an open letter from the QCGN in the Quebec Chronicle-Telegraph.
The concerns about the protection of the rights of English-speaking Quebecers in Bill C-13 voiced by the Quebec Community Groups Network, among others, “have been courageously brought forward in Ottawa by several Montreal Liberal MPs,” reads a piece by the Montreal Gazette Editorial Board. To see these MPs being chastised by fellow Parliamentarians and several political commentators for their defence of Quebec’s English-speaking minority “is deeply disheartening”.
At the House Committee on Official Languages’ meeting on Jan, 31, 2023, a Bloc Québécois motion to insert “French as the common language of Quebec” into Canada’s Official Languages Act (OLA) was defeated. A majority of MPs on the committee studying Bill C-13, which would amend the OLA were uncomfortable with the concept of a ‘common language’ being contained in Canadian legislation.
The QCGN does not support the use of the term “common language”, which was used in Bill 96 to unilaterally amend the Constitution Act, 1867.
Contrary to what some political commentators have claimed, the attempt by Liberal MPs to remove mention of the Charter of the French Language from Bill C-13 was an attempt to correct a serious flaw in the bill that would have constitutional effects for linguistic minorities across the country, and not the act of a “crusade against French”.
The QCGN is funded by the Government of Canada through the Department of Canadian Heritage.
