Harper Trades Minority Rights for Votes
In 2000 Stephen Harper’s National Citizens Coalition financed lawyer Brent Tyler’s attempts to strike down parts of Québec’s French Language Charter. The Calgary-based NCC was even the biggest donor in Brent Tyler’s attempt to change Québec’s laws in the provincial jurisdiction of language and education.
The challenge to Québec’s language law was considered a civil rights issue by it’s Brent Tyler and his backers.
Seven years later Stephen Harper is actively trying to win the support of the strongest supporters of Bill 101.
Since he became the head of the Conservative Party Stephen Harper has performed better than expected in Québec, winning 10 seats in the last general election and an eleventh in a by-election last year. His success in Québec has been attributed to his openness to Québec nationalists and his pledges to keep the federal government out of provincial jurisdictions.
As Prime Minister Stephen Harper held a vote in the House of Commons recognizing Québec as a Nation within a united Canada and recently hinted that wants the recognition of the Nation of Québec to be part of the Canadian constitution.
Québec’s French Language Charter, bill 101, is considered a near-fundamental law by many in Québec and several hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets in 1988 when the Supreme Court invalidated some dispositions regarding commercial signs.
In 2000 stepehen Harper was not considered a friend of Québec. Along with Stephen Harper, others who were financing Brent Tyler’s efforts were Howard Galganov, Diane Francis and the weekly newspaper The Suburban, all of whom have often been accused of racist sentiment against French-Canadians.
Many of the people represented by Tyler were even angry to learn that their legal campaign was being financed by money from Alberta.
In his attempt to build a coalition large enough to win a majority in the House of Commons the Prime Minister has actively been reaching out to French-speaking nationalists and Québec right-wingers, a group that generally supports Québec’s language legislation and does not approve of Canadian activism in Québec politics.
The Supreme Court of Canada rejected Brent Tyler’s attempt to open Québec’s English schools to francophones in 2005. The English-Rights lawyer recently announced that all his legal campaigns were jeopardized by the Conservative government’s decision to abolish the Court Challenges Program, a program designed to help minorities fight for their rights in court.
AngryFrenchGuy 
le 5 janvier 2005 – To whom this may concern,
Who is this angry French guy anyway ? If it is Patrick Bourgeois, as one might suspect, since this appears to be his blog, (at least in the introductory capsule in the Internet site Vigile), should not the name Bourgeois appear under each article in this blog ? If only to clearly separate his texts, from the racist replies he gets from his anglo antagonists and tormentors !?
But wait –, why does the name Chris Pearson appear less than 2 inches from where I am writing this very note !? Is Pearson the proverbial Anglo who keeps “peasouper” Bourgeois on a tight leash, to make sure the latter does not perjure himself, as much as he injures the English language ?
“Perjury” (wilfully telling an untruth) is perhaps excessive here, as I struggle to understand, what the hell Bourgeois means, most of the time. If I am not mentally correcting his errors, grammatical or otherwise, at the same time.
Like John Chretin, Bourgeois appears to be “a perfect bilingual”, that is, we are unable to understand him in either his francified English – nor does his English make any sense, when translated back into French …
! Hey, don’t get me wrong, some of my best enemies are peasoupers – as a matter of fact – I AM A PEASOUPER !
Once, long ago, in my foolish optimism, I dreamt of creating such a blog, where men of good will from both the Québec and CanadiAn nations would surely be able to reconcile their irreconcilable differences. How foolish I was ! There are only wronged and hateful people on both sides of the divide, and never shall the twains meet !
One can only hope that you and your French-CanadiAn minions, will soon push us much too far, so that we can “get down to brass tacks”, as Michèle Lalonde expressed it in 1980, in “SPEAK WHITE !”
“Nous sommes un peuple rancunier, mais ne reprochons à personne d’avoir le monopole de la correction de langage, dans la langue douce de Shakespeare, avec l’accent de Longfellow.
… We’re doing all right – we’re doing fine – we are not alone ! Nous savons que nous ne sommes pas seuls !” FJP.
François Perrier
January 5, 2008 at 10:52 pm