I'm going to make my presentation in English because my level of French is at about an intermediate level. Mr. D'Andrea's French much stronger than mine, but I know there's translation and the documentation has been translated. So I'm just going to take the 10 minutes to make the statement.
I want to talk about three things in the ten minutes. The first is who is the Greater Quebec Movement. Some people know, although some people are unaware of who we are. We're an anglophone group in Quebec, and I'll explain that. The second thing is what kind of litigation we think we would be engaged in and how that would relate to the court challenges program if it was to be reinstated. And third is what the program itself means to us and our recommendation regarding it.
First, the Greater Quebec Movement is a non-government-funded and non-partisan anglophone think tank founded in 1995. It's a non-profit corporation. We've been noticed in the Canadian—mostly Quebec—and international media for our unusual position of advocating integrated French and English public schools, or what we call “the Quebec school”, which we feel doesn't exist at this point. I sent Mr. Truelove an article that Mr. D'Andrea and I wrote in the Gazette on this issue, called “Anglos Need an Education”. I think it has been put into French for those of you who would prefer it in French.
One of our principal preoccupations is our concern that separate language-based schools segregate Quebec children into two groups that may, by virtue of that segregation, grow up to feel that they are in competing solitudes and as adults subsequently grow suspicious and resentful of the other language community. We feel that one could draw many parallels between Quebec and Northern Ireland, where institutions, especially schools, have likewise acted as agents of segregation along religious lines, with disastrous results for social cohesion of that society.
In advocating the Quebec school, it is not our objective to remove the provisions of section 23 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which protects the anglophone community's right to control its own school system, but we would welcome either the creation of English-French public language schools in their own right or jointly managed schools between English- and French-language-based school boards, as they currently exist in Quebec.
Since we first promoted this idea in Quebec, we've had several legal opinions as to the constitutionality of our Quebec school proposal, which has raised some concerns. One constitutional authority, whose name I won't use because he has a high-ranking position in government, told us that section 23 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms may be cited not only as guaranteeing the right to receive an education in English in Quebec but also as a sort of de facto right of anglophone self-segregation. Following this reading, which he and others have told us about, we are concerned that opponents to us—and there are several people in the English community in Quebec, unfortunately, who see us as basically traitors for advocating integrated schools—feel they might be able to lodge a constitutional challenge, claiming that by creating a Quebec school integrated with francophones and anglophones with a common bilingual or dual-language curriculum, we would be trying to challenge their right to self-segregation.
At the moment, the two opposition parties in Quebec's National Assembly are committed to bringing forward a separate written constitution for the province of Quebec. As such, it is more than likely that any public discussion about a Quebec constitution will inevitably deal with what that constitution should include. At present, suggestions by the Parti Québécois have been that it could include parts of the Charter of the French Language in Quebec. It could deal with Quebec's Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms and whatnot.
The Greater Quebec Movement has consistently supported, for the last 20 years, the development of a new linguistic social contract between anglophones and francophones within a Quebec constitution.
We've had many publications on this in Quebec City's Le Soleil, in local papers in Montreal, The Suburban, and this summer I had a large article in Le Devoir, translated by Mr. Turp of the Parti Québécois. I have sent the text to Mr. Truelove, with these op-eds, and they are available.
We are very happy with the support our proposal for integrated schools has generated among younger anglophones and francophones across Quebec's political spectrum. We are hoping that we will be able to garner enough support so that if a Quebec constitution is drafted in the next few years, we could put in it the legal infrastructure for the development of a common Quebec integrated school.
Now, how would this relate to the Canadian court challenges program? Well, we feel that if the program were restored, you could have two diametrically opposed requests for support. There would be our group, which would say that a Quebec school is consistent with the spirit of section 23, and there would be those who feel it is inconsistent with the right of self-segregation of Quebec anglophones into their own schools and into their own school system.
Which challenge would the program support? These are some of the problems we face, with a lot of questions dealing with the support of anglophone advocacy organizations and the court challenges program as a specific example.
While well-intentioned, the Canadian court challenges program has become controversial, and as such, opposition to the program has grown throughout the rest of the country. The Greater Quebec Movement, although non-partisan, sees as legitimate the claims by other non-governmental organizations that the CCP was often hijacked by advocates of specific points of view or ideologies to the exclusion of other viewpoints within the same disadvantaged and/or minority groups.
Now, in general, our organization, which includes people from left to right philosophically, has opposed funding of general minority activism by the Canadian government and the legal activism of the CCP.
In fact, we wrote an editorial in 1999 in the Montreal Gazette talking about how, while well-intentioned, the support of anglophone groups in Quebec actually wound up doing a disservice to our community, as opposed to helping our community, because the money itself became something that all the factions in English Quebec fought over. If anything, then, it rewarded exclusive behaviour, not inclusive behaviour. Again, Mr. Truelove has been provided with this text.
The article might appear quite prophetic. If you follow what happened to Alliance Québec—Mr. D'Andrea and I and others were involved in that organization—the money hurt us. It did not help the English community. It did not help the advance of public policy in that community. It just created elitism, exclusivism, and stagnation in that organization.
That said, we appreciate there are people in our community and across the country who support continued funding of advocacy groups and the court challenges program specifically. In this article we put forward the proposal that a matching program be done by the Canadian government, so that each of the groups making a claim for support could have money matched, based on how much money they raised privately within their community. That way it would offer a fair means by which everyone would be on an even playing field, because it has been our concern that government support of these programs has created an unlevel playing field among different points of view in those communities.
Moreover, we can't imagine how minority organizations will be able to plan effective litigation when they won't know if the funds they need will be coming or not, because if one government is in power, the money could be cut off. If another government is in power, it could be restored.
The compromise we are proposing would be twofold. There's the matching program, which I just mentioned, where the groups would have to raise some money, and then the government could match that money, although they would still have to live within the guidelines of Heritage Canada, in which they'd have to do the necessary paperwork and have to be a non-profit organization. Also, we would advocate the establishment of a Heritage Canada ombudsman so that litigants who feel they are encountering unfair bias by CCP administrative staff would have some recourse.
In conclusion, we understand and appreciate the concerns of those who feel that the CCP was effectively run in a biased fashion that served to reward advocates of only one viewpoint within specific disadvantaged groups. But without checks on these programs, the Greater Quebec Movement cannot support the continuation of government funding, so in effect supports the discontinuation of government funding—if it is not reformed. If it could be reformed along the lines we have said, then we would be willing to support its restoration.
Thank you.
