COLUMN ONE : A Tongue Lashing in Canada : An English-only frenzy is sweeping the provinces, and some say it’s propelled by anti-French prejudice as well as economics.

For Claudette Blier-Houle, the trouble started with a simple attempt to get a better education for her children.

“I never anticipated such a negative response,” Blier-Houle said recently. “I certainly didn’t expect to precipitate a revolt.”

Nevertheless, Blier-Houle, an accountant, is embroiled in a bitter dispute between French- and English-speakers that is spreading across Canada. One commentator has called it “a cancer that leaps from one part of a ravaged body to another.”

Last night, the City Council of Thunder Bay voted to make English the city’s only working language. The council’s members arrived at this decision after hearing that Blier-Houle and a dozen other French-speaking parents were trying to set up special French-language classrooms in the city’s public schools. The issue attracted a capacity crowd of hooting spectators to the council chambers. And a small, anti-bilingual picket line appeared in front of City Hall.

The vote makes Thunder Bay, a city of 113,000 people in southwest Ontario, the largest in a series of the province’s municipalities to declare themselves English-only.

Twenty-seven other municipal governments in Ontario have passed similar measures, and still more are scheduled to put the question to a vote. Most of the places involved are small, and the first votes caused little controversy. But now that larger places, like Thunder Bay, are weighing in, the English-only movement has set off a chain reaction.

Mayors as far away as New Brunswick, on the eastern seaboard, have begun talking about making their towns unilingual, and Indian politicians in Canada’s far north are now questioning whether Canada’s federal bilingual laws should apply to their native Canadian constituents. The English-only debate has become a regular feature on national newscasts.

English-only activists say they have nothing against French-speakers but simply object to bad economics. They say Canada’s bilingual road signs, duplicate government paper work and switchboard operators saying, “Good morning, bonjour ,” cost too much--especially in places like Thunder Bay, where only a tiny minority speaks French.

But few French-speaking Canadians believe that the English-only movement is inspired by fiscal conservatism alone.

“The real issue is prejudice,” Blier-Houle declared.

The Francophones seem prepared to fight back. Shortly after the port city of Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, declared itself English-only, a government translator in the French-speaking city of Montreal put the following weather report on the national news wires: “Mainly sunny with racists . . . clouding over this afternoon . . . chance of flurries and of Nazis.” The translator was suspended without pay.

Canada has long had disputes over language, but the current one is brewing at a particularly inopportune time politically. Ottawa has been trying since 1982 to get all 10 of the country’s provinces to ratify the national constitution. (Before 1981, Canada did not have a constitution; its charter was an act of the British Parliament dating from 1867.) In the early 1980s, the holdout province was French-speaking Quebec.

In 1987, Prime Minister Brian Mulroney oversaw the drafting of a set of constitutional amendments designed to bring Quebec on board. Canadians call these amendments collectively the Meech Lake Accord because they were drawn up at the resort of Meech Lake, Quebec. All provinces have until June to ratify it, or it will die.

The package looked to be a shoo-in at first, but some have begun having second thoughts. One of the most frequently cited objections is a clause recognizing Quebec as a “distinct society” from the rest of Canada. The distinction has prompted Canadian women, Indians, immigrants and other social groups to wonder why they, too, cannot be considered “distinct” under the law.

English-speaking provinces have begun to worry that the clause will give Quebec special rights above the rest of the country.

It now seems unlikely that Canada will ratify the Meech Lake Accord by the June deadline. And some Canadians say that, if the provinces cannot agree on Meech Lake, the whole nation may crack apart. A poll taken for the newsmagazine Maclean’s found that 40% of Canadians believe that Quebec may break off from the country sometime during the decade.

In the midst of these fears, Ontario’s spate of English-only resolutions shows how fast and far the national barometer is falling.

In Thunder Bay, for instance, the normally somnolent City Council chambers were filled to capacity for the English-only vote. Two members, both women, tried to explain to the crowd that the resolution was unnecessary--Canada’s federal language laws do not force municipalities to spend any money on French services--but English-speakers muttered, clucked their tongues and finally began to boo.

“This kind of resolution makes us look like a hick town,” one woman said.

At this, one of the men present gave a shout and stormed from the room.

Blier-Houle, the French-speaking mother whose lobbying had given the English-speakers their rallying point, said she was “completely surprised” by what happened at the meeting.

Thunder Bay does not have any all-French public schools, and she had been sending her three children to a Roman Catholic school that taught them in French. But when her eldest son entered the eighth grade, she noticed that a good deal of class time was being devoted to confirmation classes. Blier-Houle’s son was not planning to join the Catholic Church, so for him the catechism classes were a waste of time.

Blier-Houle says she first tried sending him to one of the French “immersion” programs run for English-speaking youngsters in Thunder Bay’s public schools. But to her surprise, his ability to speak French deteriorated. It turned out, she said, that the English pupils were speaking English on the side during the immersion course.

That was when Blier-Houle decided to press the school board to set aside French-only classrooms.

“How could it get so distorted?” she said. “I suspect it comes from the strong anti-Francophone sentiment in this country at the present.”

Indeed, Quebec has managed to ruffle the feathers of English-speaking Canada--at a time, oddly, when long-standing French-Canadian tendencies toward separatism appeared to be peacefully dormant.

It was in the 1960s and 1970s that Quebec’s French-speakers had seemed likeliest to break off, in a form of independence called “sovereignty association.” Radicals in Montreal even bombed mailboxes marked with the British crown, and the Quebec government emblazoned license plates in the province with the phrase “I remember” in French, meaning the province remembered war waged hundreds of years ago between French and English Canadians.

The separatist movement was embodied in the Parti Quebecois, swept to political power in 1976 on a promise to let the province vote on independence. But when the vote was held in 1980, the public rejected independence decisively. Polls taken in the early 1980s showed that Quebecers had less and less interest in the issue. The Parti Quebecois was voted out of office in 1985, and it appeared that the separatist agenda would have to be shelved.

But old antagonisms die hard. In 1988, Quebec annoyed English-speaking Canada anew by supporting a new bilateral trade agreement with the United States; the rest of the country vigorously opposed the pact. The trade agreement was finally signed in 1989. Since then, Canada’s economy has begun to slow down, and English-speaking Canadians are fond of blaming the trade pact--and Quebec.

Still more provocative, Quebec not long ago enacted a law banning English-language signs on its streets. Wary English-speakers figure that if Quebec will adopt French-only sign laws without the benefit of the Meech Lake Accord and its “distinct society” privileges, it might be capable of any number of divisive measures once the pact is ratified.

In Thunder Bay, English-speakers referred to the sign law again and again as evidence of the need to put perceived French chauvinists in their place.

“The French are afraid of losing their language and their culture through assimilation,” said Bryant Webster, a mechanic who is president of Thunder Bay’s Alliance to Preserve English in Canada, an advocacy group. “They want to totally isolate themselves from this society--and they want the rest of us to fund that for them.”