From: bghauk@watdragon.uwaterloo.ca (Brian)
Subject: Francophones nationally oppressed on basis of language
Keywords: oppression, constitution
Organization: University of Waterloo
Distribution: can
Date: Fri, 4 Sep 1992 22:31:59 GMT

The following article appeared as a special feature in the May 1989 issue
of Lutte ouvriere, a magazine now called L'internationaliste. It explains
that many Qubcois are demanding a referendum on sovereignty because
francophones in Canada are victims of a system of discrimination and
oppression. Apparently, the internet mailer will eliminate French
accents.

The author has given permission for this article to be publicly distributed.

By Michel Prairie


The stakes for working people in the fight for Qubcois language rights
========================================================================

   A major confrontation is unfolding in Canada today over the question
of the language rights of the French-speaking people of the province of
Qubec.
   The issue erupted last December 15 when the Supreme Court of Canada
overturned the section of Qubec's Law 101 which prohibits the use of
languages other than French on signs in Qubec. This was the third time in
ten years that the highest court in Canada had invalidated a section of Law
101.
   Law 101 was adopted by the Qubec government in 1977 following years of
broadly supported and often massive struggles protesting the discrimination
Qubecois face because of their language.
   On December 18, some 20,000 people rallied at Montral's Paul-Sauv
arena to denounce the latest Supreme Court decision, to defend Law 101 and
to demand restoration of the Law 101 clauses on the language of signs.
   The rally was called by the Movement for a French Qubec (MFQ), a
coalition uniting Qubec's three main trade union federations, the Union of
Agricultural Producers and several artistic, and nationalist groups and
organizations.
   The provincial Liberal government of Premier Robert Bourassa responded
to these contradictory pressures by passing Law 178. This new law
authorizes the use of other languages alongside French on signs inside
businesses while retaining French-only signs outdoors.
   The adoption of Law 178 provoked a deep polarization in Qubec and
across Canada.
   On one side, using its media, Canada's capitalist rulers immediately
launched a vicious chauvinist campaign against the Qubecois. One wing of
the ruling class stepped up it's attack on the Meech Lake accord, claiming
it gives the Qubec government too many concessions under the constitution.
   The Meech Lake accord was ratified in June 1987 by Canadian Prime
Minister Brian Mulroney and the provincial premiers. The accord was
designed to win Qubec's acceptance of the 1982 constitution in exchange
for recognition of Qubec's "distinct character" within Canada.
   The 1982 constitution took several historic rights away from Qubec, in
particular the exclusive right to determine the province's language policy.
It was imposed on Qubec by the federal government and the other provinces,
despite opposition from the vast majority of Qubecois.
   The Meech Lake accord is a fraud. It fully maintains the central aspects
of the 1982 constitution, while the "distinct character" of Qubec that it
recognizes is meaningless. It gives the appearance of at least partially
recognizing Qubec's right to national self-determination, while actually
restoring none of the rights taken away in 1982.
   The ruling class campaign against Law 101 was centered on the Qubec
government's decision to use the "notwithstanding" clause contained in the
Canadian constitution to exempt the section of Law 178 on unilingual signs
from the provisions of the Canadian Charter of Rights.
   This clause in the constitution allows the federal and provincial
governments to suspend application of the Charter of Rights when they pass
laws. Up unti now several governments have done so--sometimes to attack the
trade union rights of working people--without provoking the least political
outcry in ruling circles.
   In the case of Law 178 what scandalized the ruling class was not that
the Qubec government suspended the Charter of Rights. It was because the
Qubec government did it under pressure from the Qubcois who saw this as
a way to defend their language rights.
   In this situation the MFQ launched a broad protest campaign aginst Law
178. Its goal was to restore the provisions of Law 101 on the language of
signs which the Supreme Court had overturned.
   On March 12, 60,000 people poured into the streets of Montral to demand
French-only signs. It was one of the largest political demonstrations in
Canadian history.
   In this context, a broad debate broke out in Qubec on the "danger"
facing the Qubecois nationally because of its declining birth rate and the
massive anglicization of immigrants who come to Qubec.
   The labour movement in Canada today is deeply divided on all these
questions.
   While Qubec unions fiercely defend Law 101, including French-only
signs, the trade union leadership in the rest of the country has been
complicit in the ruling class attacks against the Qubecois through its
complete silence in the face of those attacks.
   At its April convention the Qubec wing of the New Democratic Party
(NDP) split from the federal NDP because of the chauvinist, anti-Qubec
policies of the federal party leadership. It is the third time in almost
thirty years that the NDP has blown apart like this over the national
question in Qubec. The NDP, a party whose leadership and program are
social-democratic, has close ties to the unions, particularly those outside
of Qubec.
   In the present polarization, two reactionary positions have come to
dominate the debate.
   On the one side, the Canadian ruling class is fighting with all its
strength to reinforce the national and linguistic oppression of the
Qubcois--at the very time that it is denying that such oppression exists.
   On the other side, the capitalist and petty-bourgeois forces which today
dominate the struggle to defend Qubcois language rights are more and more
openly proposing to conduct this defense by attacking the rights of other
sectors of the working class.
   From the point of view of the interests of the workers and farmers of
Canada, this debate has nothing to do with a struggle between French and
English or between language minorities and majorities who cannot tolerate
one another--which is how bourgeois spokespeople present the question.
   What is at stake is the capacity of our class to struggle against the
oppression of one of its component parts--the Qubcois--and to do it by
directing its fire against the ruling class and its government, not against
other workers and farmers.
   If this does not happen, the working class in Canada will become
increasingly divided. The only ones who will benefit from such a situation
will be the capitalists of this country--English, as well as
French-speaking--capitalists who have effectively used the weapone of
national division for 150 years.
   The purpose of this article is to explain the importance of this
question for the workers and farmers of Canada and to show how they must
respond in order to forge their own unity.

A system of oppression
----------------------

   There are 5.8 million francophones in Canada, that is, people whose
language spoken at home is French. They make up a little more than
one-fifth of the total population of this country. The vast majority of
these francophones, 5.2 million people, live in the province of Qubec
where they comprise 80 percent of the population.
   In reality there are many more people in Canada whose family background
is francophone. But hundreds of thousands of them have stopped speaking
their language, or never learned it, because of the ruler's policy of
forced assimilation of francophones. Francophones in Canada are the
victims of a system of discrimination and oppression. Qubcois, the
French-speaking people of Qubec, are the largest of the oppressed
nationalities in Canada. The Native peoples and the Acadians--francophones
who live in the Atlantic provinces--also suffer from national oppression.
   The first form that this oppression takes is the denial of their right
to self-determination.
   Like the Acadians and the Native peoples, Qubcois were forced into the
Canadian confederation in 1867. The 1867 constitution granted only the most
minimal rights. The ruling class has never hesitated in the past to use its
police and its army to suppress their uprisings and their demands--the most
recent major example being the military invasion of Qubec in October 1970.
   While French-speaking minorities in the rest of Canada don't constitute
distinct nationalities as the Qubcois and the Acadians, they also face
systematic oppression and discrimination.
   In 1985 the average income of people whose mother tongue is French was
92.8 percent of the average income of the Canadian population as a whole.
   In 1988 one francophone in two living outside Qubec was unable to
attend a French-language school despite the fact that this is one right
officially recognized in the Canadian constitution.
   Qubec has slightly more than one-quarter of the total Canadian
population--25.7 percent. After Ontarion, it is the second most
industrialized province in Canada. In 1987 Qubec's gross domestic product
represented 23 percent of the Canadian total. Over the last six years,
Qubec has had the strongest rate of economic growth in all of Canada.
   However, the vast majority of the Qubcois do not benefit from the
wealth they create.
   In 1987 Qubec had 30.5 percent of all unemployed in the country. In
1986 it had 32.3 percent of all those living below the poverty level and
36.6 percent of those living on government welfare.
   In terms of family income, between 1970 and 1986, Qubec dropped from
fifth to eigth in the ranking of Canadian provinces. And in 1987 nearly one
in four people in Qubec lived in poverty, making it Canada's second
poorest province after Newfoundland.
   It is hardly surprising to learn that in 1988 Qubec counted for
one-third of all suicides in Canada.
   These statistics, however, understate the actual situation facing the
vast majority of the Qubcois because they are amalgams.
   On the one hand, they include non-francophones who live in Qubec.
Despite gains made by francophones over the last decade, English remains
the language of social advancement in the province.
   In 1985, people in Qubec whose mother tongue is English earned an
average of $3,043 more than those whose maternal language is French--15
percent more. The network of English schools and hospitals still offers
higher quality services than the French system.
   Under such conditions, despite the fact that 80 percent of the Qubec
population speaks French, it is not surprising that 40 percent of Qubec
anglophones do not speak French, and that three out of every four
immigrants who adopt a new language choose English.
   Because they are overall averages these statistics also mask growing
inequalities between francophones. Over 25 years of massive struggle
against language discrimination and for Qubcois national rights has led
to the development of a significant layer of powerful francophone
capitalists along with a large middle class layer of well-off managers and
professionals. This development was especially pronounced during the 1980s.
   At the beginning of the 1960s there were almost no francophone
capitalists in Qubec. By 1988, 19 of the 50 wealthiest capitalists in the
province were francophone controlling tens of billions of dollars.
   Some of their corporations have interests throughout the world. This is
true, for example, of the engineering company Lavalin; of Bombardier, which
manufactures transportation equipment; and of the pulp and paper company,
Cascades. They have thousands of employees in Qubec, in the rest of
Canada, in the U.S., in France and elsewhere in the world.
   For the majority of Qubcois, who in their majority are workers or
farmers, the real situation is worse than the statistics indicate.
   It is this reality that explains why, over the past two and a half
years, tens of thousands of Qubcois have poured into the streets on four
separate occasions to defend their rights.

Capitalism "made in Canada"
---------------------------

The oppression and discrimination suffered by francophones is an integral
part of the capitalist system in Canada.
   Many opponents of the oppression of the Qubcois believe the oppression
of the Qubcois began with the conquest of New France by England in 1760.
This view is incorrect.
   Then a colony of France, New France had some 60,000 inhabitants, the
majority of them peasants. After the conquest, England maintained the same
colonial sytem of oppression that New France had already been a victim of,
and which all other European colonies in America also suffered under.
   This oppression denied the inhabitants of these colonies the right to
decide their own destiny. Language was not an issue. It was this colonial
oppression that led, in the period from 1775 to 1820, to the U.S. war of
independence, the Haitian revolution, and to the development of Latin
America's national liberation struggles against Spain.
   Shortly after the conquest, the British conquerors wanted to prevent the
American revolution from spreading to Qubec. They made an alliance with
the Catholic Church and the landlords ("seigneurs") of the former French
colony by maintaining the relations of semi-feudal exploitation which
existed in the countryside. These relations above all benefitted the former
ruling classes of the French colony, who drew their wealth from control of
the land.
   Later, the British conquerors created a colonial landed aristocracy from
scratch in Ontario, to the west of Qubec, by distributing immense tracts
of land to a handful of landlords and the Anglican Church hierarchy. The
majority of the inhabitants in this region spoke English.
   The struggle to regain control of the land, to oppose colonial
domination, and for democracy pushed the peasants, workers, artisans and
small local manufacturers in Qubec and Ontario to rise up against Britain
in 1837-38. This uprising was the beginning of a bourgeois-democratic
revolution.
   England crushed the uprising. The defeat had disastrous consequences for
workers and farmers throughout Canada. It prevented the extension to Canada
of democratic gains won 65 years earlier in the United States; an end to
colonial domination, the separation of church and state, a much broader
freedom of association and political expression, etc.
   The defeat of the 1837-38 uprising led directly to the reactionary
constitution of 1867, which gave birth to Canada by bringing together the
key remaining British colonies in North America.
   This laid the basis for the national oppression of the Qubcois, one of
the trademarks of the Canadian capitalist state.
   Agriculture in Qubec never recovered from the defeat suffered by the
peasants who had been trying through revolutionary means to rid themselves
of the semi-feudal relations in the countryside. The resulting backward
character of Qubec's agriculture considerably retarded the province's
economic development. It was the main cause of the poverty that dominated
the province for many years--one of the hallmarks of national oppression.
   England also took advantage of its victory to prevent any new
convergence of the struggles led by the French and English speaking workers
and farmers of the colony. It was at this point that England, in alliance
with the colony's reactionary classes, consciously institutionalized the
national and linguistic oppression of the Qubcois.
   Qubec and Ontario were united into a single province. The use of French
was prohibited in the new parliament. Even though Qubec had nearly twice
the population, it was granted the same number of parliamentary
representatives as Ontario. The weight of Ontario's enormous debt was
shifted onto the shoulders of the Qubcois peasants.
   This system of oppression and discrimination was maintained and deepened
with the formation of Canada in 1867.
   The new constitution forcibly integrated Qubec into the new
confederation with the status of a province. This was a direct violation of
Qubec's right to self-determination. Qubec was the only province on which
the constitution imposed bilingual institutions, the goal being to
guarantee the privileges of the English-speaking minority.
   Finally, the 1867 constitution permanently institutionalized a dual
confessional school system in Qubec; Catholic and Protestant. This system
divided the population among national, linguistic, and religious lines. To
this day the dual system maintains an inferior education for francophones.
It is illegal to change it because Qubec's confessional school system is
written into the constitution of the country.
   Less than 20 years after the founding of Canada, the new class of
rich capitalists clearly demonstrated what the real place of
francophones was in "their" country.
   In 1855 this new national bourgeoisie carried out a bloody crushing
of the Mtis. Led by Louis Riel, the Mtis had risen against the theft
of their lands and the denial of their rights by the new Ottawa
government. The Mtis, a people of Indian, French and English origin,
lived in the prairies in central Canada. The majority of them spoke
French, the others English. They lived mainly by hunting and farming.
   Five years later the province of Manitoba declared itself to be
unilingual English, in violation of the terms of the agreement bringing
it into the Canadian federation. At the time it became a province, the
vast majority of its population was French-speaking. Today francophones
represent less than five percent of Manitoba's population.
   This is the result of a century of policies which have prohibited the
teaching and even the use of French in public schools, consciously
encouraged immigration of anglophones in the province and discouraged
francophone immigration from Qubec and the Acadian portion of New
Brunswick. Added to this has been the systematic discrimination against
francophones and their forced assimilation into the anglophone majority.
   In the years following the defeat of the Mtis, the majority of the
provinces outside Qubec adopted laws which considerably limited or
openly denied the rights of their francophone populations. And in 1917
Ottawa carried out an armed invasion of Qubec City to suppress the
opposition of the Qubcois to Canada's participation in the imperialist
war of 1914-18.
   By the beginning of World War II, the oppression of the Qubcois had
become increasingly explosive.
   In 1941 a mason earned $1.12 an hour working an average 40 hour week
in Toronto, Ontario. In Qubec City he earned 92 cents an hour and
worked 44 hours per week. In every branch of industry, Qubcois workers
earned an average of 10 cents to 25 cents an hour less and worked from
four to twelve hours longer each week than their sisters and brothers in
Ontario.
   In 1941, the infant mortality rate was 75.9 per 1,000 live births in
Qubec, compared to 46.5 in Ontario. In the city of Trois-Rivi
res,
Qubec, this figure climbed to 297 in 1937. This was higher than the
infant mortality rate in Bombay, India, which reached 250 in 1936.
   The tuberculosis rate in Ontario was 26 per 100,000 inhabitants, in
contrast to 80.6 in Qubec; that is, three times higher! It rose to
542.2 in the city of Rimouski, to the east of Qubec City.
   In Qubec education up to 14 years of age was made obligatory in
1943. The government spent less money per student there than in any
other province. The illiteracy rate was two times higher than in
Ontario. Only nine of the 27 public libraries in Qubec were
francophone.
   Doubly oppressed, as women and as Qubcois, Qubec women did not
obtain the right to vote in the provincial elections until 1940. This
was much later than in the other Canadian provinces.
   The fact that Qubcois capitalists controlled only 20 percent of
the industrial capital invested in Qubec in 1937, a figure that had not
changed by the beginning if the 1960s, is another expression of national
oppression.

A tool of the employers
-----------------------

   This oppressive and discriminatory system played a central role in the
formation of the Canadian capitalist class, at first as a national
bourgeoisie in the second half of the 19th century and later as an
imperialist ruling class. Whether it is based on language, nationality,
skin color, sex, or religion, oppression fulfills two vital functions
for the capitalists of all countries.
   The bosses use oppression as an important tool to superexploit working
people. When the capitalists in Canada pay close to 10 percent less in
wages to workers whose first language is French, 27 percent less to
Blacks, or 34 percent less to women, who pockets the difference?
Certainly not the working people.
   In capitalist society wage scales, working conditions and services
are established from the bottom up, not vice versa. Under capitalism
there are never enough jobs for everyone, a situation that creates
permanent and often sharp competition between workers.
   By lowering the value of the labor power of often sizeable sectors of
the working population, the capitalists exert a downward pressure on the
wages of all workers. If entire groups of working people can work harder
and live on less, why can't others?
   The oppression of Qubcois and other francophones, of women, of
Native peoples and of Blacks has meant, and still means, billions of
dollars of profits for Canadian capitalists. They have a considerable
material interest in maintaining such a system.
   For the capitalists, the oppression of certain sectors of the population
also fulfills a political function. The ruling class uses such oppression to
prevent workers and farmers from uniting in a common struggle against their
exploitation.
   This policy of divide and rule has been particularly successful in
Canada where the rulers have been able to win to their anti-francophone and
anti-Qubcois policies the leaderships of the largest unions, the
Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) and its successor, the
NDP--social democratic parties linked to the unions.
   Anti-Qubcois and anti-francophone prejudices and lack of support of
their struggles by the rest of the labor movement have fuelled among
workers and farmers in Qubec a real resentment towards their sisters
and brothers in the rest of the country. For their part, the Qubec
union leaderships, with their own bourgeois-nationalist approach, have
consciously used this resentment to block working class unity on a
cross-country scale.
   Today, a significant majority of unionized Qubec workers are members of
unions or union federations that are not linked to labor bodies in the
rest of Canada. Up until now a mass party uniting people in Qubec with
those in the rest of the country has never been built. The NDP has been
unable to sink roots in Qubec because of its openly anti-Qubcois
positions.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

I've typed-in about half of Michel's Lutte ouvri
re article, and encourage
anyone interested in reading the rest or similar articles to contact the
nearest Pathfinder Bookstore.

In Montreal, call (514)273-2503. In Toronto, their number is (416)533-4324.

Most importantly, ask them about the Militant newsweekly and their public
political meetings called Militant Labor Forums.
Newsgroups: can.francais