AngryFrenchGuy

This is exactly why Québec must become an independent country.

Once upon a time, back in the late 90’s, Québec’s different cultural communities had their own TV station, called la Télévision Ethnique du Québec.  It was a public access community station that broadcast cheap looking shows of uncomfortable looking men and women sitting on chairs and talking in one of 35 languages in front of cartboard sets.

Of course it sucked.  How could immigrants and wide-eyed community activists fresh out of CEGEP ever produce any good TV? Especially back in those days before digital when making TV actually cost money?

Yeah, but it was local TV.  Made by Montreal’s immigrants and about their lives and concerns.

In the summer of 1995, a date which I am sure has no significance whatsoever, Canada’s guardian of the airwaves gave away TEQ’s valuable cable channel to some vast media empire that eventually traded it to CanWest media, the owners of the Montreal Gazette, Global TV and the National Post.  Within 18 months of the sale, as many as 20 local shows were replaced by shows produced in Toronto or the States.   Interestingly, the cut shows were essentially those “from communities more integrated in the francophone majority”, according to Pedro Quirido, president of producers union of TEQ.  Eventually locally produced programming was all but abandoned and actual ethnic content dropped from 100% less than 60%.  David Letterman and infomercial made up the rest of the grid.

“One City, many Cultures”, became CJNT slogan.  To which we can add: One language.

Yep.  Nearly all of the station’s ID and promos suddenly became all-English and French became just another one of Montréal’s linguistic communities.  Montréal’s “multilingulal” TV station still only has an English only website.

Just like the founders of the station warned ten years ago, the owners of the Montreal Gazette transformed a TV station run by and for Montréal’s ethnic communities into a pedagogical tool used to perpetuate the myth that Québec’s allophones and anglophones are one and the same community and the “ethnic” programming became like training wheels on a bike used to train immigrants into consumers of anglo media.

Either these people don’t know that at least 60% of Québec’s immigrants are French-speakers when they get here…

…or they do know, and they are trying hard to do something about it.

You know, for all the angst about the use of English by Québec’s immigrants, the majority of them are already part of the French-speaking community when they get here!  Seven out of the top 10 countries of origin of immigrants are part of the Francophonie.  The US is the only English-speaking country of origin in the top 10 and, please, I beg you to argue Americans don’t have acces to enough TV in their language.  French is still the most used language by 60% of immigrant workers, it is the language their children study in and the language of the majority of the people who live around them.

There is no justification for CJNT treating them like generic Anglos.  It’s not based on demographics, culture or any real numbers.

Except economics.  Of course, the owners of CJNT are going to trash locally produced programing in favour of  cheaper mass produced Toronto and American fare.  And of course a media empire in the business of selling English-thinking minds to advertisers will use all its ressources to train and format more and more English-thinking minds and consumers.

That is why they put on air a channel where nearly all station IDs, commercials, and promos are in English and an English only website when targeting a market that is mostly French-speaking and living in a city where French is supposed to be the common language.  That’s somewhere between disrespectful and socially dangerous.

And it sure as hell is not an innocent decision.

This week CanWest Global sold CJNT to Toronto’s Channel Zero.  Will the pornographers give back the station to cultural communities?

It’s doubtful.  Not only did the CRTC not demand that the station stop acting like an ESL network, it straight out relieved the new owners of of any obligation to use any French at all!  (Which is not a reasonnable decision, Fagstein, if CJNT continues to broadcast in English). Read all about the company’s purchase of a multilingual channel in a French-speaking city in their English-only press release right here.

The CRTC’s decisions consistently reduced the amount of programing available to cultural minorities in their language, encouraged the exclusion of immigrants from Québec society and CanWest didn’t even make any significant money.  This is a perfect illustration of why a Canada-wide body like the CRTC is inadequate to govern Québec’s airwaves.

And this is why Québec should become it’s own country.

In 1969, just a couple of years after the United States government had to send in the army to protect black students being integrated into Little Rock, Arkansas schools in spite of the violent opposition of a certain segment of the white population, the municipality of Saint-Léonard on the Montreal island went through it’s own episodes of violent riots over the integration of minorities.

The only difference is that in the case of Saint-Léonard, the white, French-speaking, majority was rioting against segregation, not in support of it.

Québec’s segregated school system is as old as Canada. It was a compromise of sorts between the Protestant industrialists of Montreal and the all powerful Catholic clergy who agreed that the province would have two completely separate and independently run school systems : one Protestant, one Catholic, which with time morphed into French and English-language systems. The dual school systems were constitutionalised in 1867 and, to this day, Québec is the only Canadian province constitutionally obligated to maintain « separate but equal » schools.

The Parti Québécois did it’s best in 1977 to create modern integrated system for all children, regardless of their origin, religion or home language.  Bill 101 established that all of Québec’s children would from now on study  and receive their education in French, the majority’s language.

Except for Québec’s English-speaking minority, of course, who’s right to it’s own parallel school system was protected.  To this day, anyone who has studied at least one year in an English school somewhere in Canada is allowed to opt out of the majority’s school system.

This, of course, is rationalised on the principal of some supposed right of children to receive education in their language.

That’s interesting because, at least in Montreal, the majority of English-speaking youth are not studying in English at all!

According to the English Montreal School Board as many as three out of four primary school students spend most of their schoolday in classes taught in French.  The so-called “core” program where the majority of classes are taught in English is the least popular of all the school board’s options and is being abandoned by parents who demand immersion and billitteracy curriculum for their children.

Even Québec’s stuffy English Private Schools that only a generation ago prepared kids in penny loafers to rule the world in English are now falling over themselves to provide rich people with the French the publicly-funded system can’t afford.  The students of Westmount’s Selwyn Housenow spend between 50% and 80% of their class time studying in French and have even added a French verse to their school hymn! (Which, I belive, was the number 3 demand in the FLQ manifesto.)

Outside Montreal the situation is even stranger with many English schools having a majority of French students and very few actual Anglos exercising their right to receive an English-language education in Québec.  In Québec City close to 60% of the students in English schools are Francophones.  This is possible because French-speaking, or for that matter, any family that has obtained a certificate of eligibility to English schools through, for example, a mixed marriage, can keep passing the privilege along to further generations until the End of Time.

(For example I posses one of the fabled Certificates of eligibility even though I was raised in a French-speaking household because my father was an alumni of the very English Lower Canada College. Had I exercised that right, I would have been able to pass it on to my descendants, regardless of the language they speak at home, as long as at least one kid from every generation studied for at least one year in an English school somewhere in Canada.

I, however, decided not to follow my father’s footsteps in the land of crew cuts (and also shattered my mother’s dream that I would study with the Jesuits of Brébeuf College like Pierre Elliot Trudeau) and once the ultra-nationalist unionized separatist teachers of l’École Notre-Dame-de-Grâce primary school were done thoroughly brainwashing my young impressionable mind, I decided to go to a multicultural French-language public High School instead.

So my family no longer belongs to the elusive society of the eligible…)

Hey, it’s not that it’s a bad idea for Québec’s English-speaking kids to take classes in French. What’s profoundly bizarre is the concept of English-speaking children immersing themselves in French in schools with no French kids two blocks away from an actual French school…

As even the Montreal Gazette reported, the result is technically bilingual kids who don’t know any French people and who are uncomfortable ordering a burger in French at McDonalds.

On the French side there is growing tension between proponents and opponents to the kind of bilingual programs that have become common on the English side.  While there is a lot of demand for them, opponents feel that the French schools’ mission of integrating immigrants into Québec society, especially in Montréal, could be seriously compromised if more English was introduced in the schools.

As a result, many French-speaking families in Montreal are massively abandoning the public school system for private schools that offer, among other things, better English classes.  Between 2001 and 2006 the number of students in Montreal’s private schools leaped by 30%.

All this together leads to a profoundly dyslexic school arrangement.  Immigrants to Québec are now intergrating themselves into Québec society in schools with no French-speaking Québécois, while Québec Francophones send their children to private schools.  Montréal Anglos are building their own parallel French school network with no French students while Francophones in the rest of the province are keeping an English school system alive even though there are no more actual English-speaking students.