IMMIGRATION / COMPETING IN QUEBEC : A French-Speaking Society Pursues an Urgent Drive for Reinforcements

This fall, when her friends are trudging back to graduate school, 23-year-old Stephanie Martin will be going off to Thailand, where, in a simple classroom of bamboo and thatch, she will teach impoverished Indochinese refugees about Quebec--everything from its political bosses to the names of Montreal subway stops.

“I’m thrilled,” Martin told an interviewer, not only at the exotic prospects but because the job dovetails so nicely with her political views.

Martin, like many young French-speaking Canadians, thinks Quebec could benefit by changing its relationship with the rest of Canada, perhaps even by becoming independent. She hopes that by seeking out prospective immigrants and tutoring them in French and the attractions of Quebec, she and others like her can help stave off an onslaught of English.

“I think immigrants are the future of Quebec,” said Martin, a doctoral candidate in the literature of Quebec.

Few places on Earth worry about getting their share of immigrants, but Quebec is militant about keeping pace with English Canada.

The province’s determined effort to attract foreigners and urge them--sometimes require them--to speak French once they arrive highlights the lengths French Canadians are willing to go to in order to protect their language and folkways from the inroads of the English-speaking world around them.

Quebec’s push for immigrants also sheds light on why relations between Quebec and the rest of Canada have plunged to their current low.

Canada’s government and very nationhood are going through a major test this summer, as Prime Minister Brian Mulroney struggles to persuade all 10 provinces to ratify a national constitution brought home from England in 1982 and amended in 1987. Quebec has refused to sign the constitution; three provinces are balking at the amendments. The deadline is June 23.

A key sticking point in the constitutional negotiations involves English Canada’s perception of Quebec, and Quebec’s vision of itself as a French-speaking society.

The bitter debate is dividing the country into rigid French/English, separatist/federalist camps, and analysts are predicting that if the accord fails, Mulroney will have great difficulty holding his government together. Quebec, for its part, may feel compelled to set in motion the process of separating from English Canada.

But the current linguistic discord dates back more than 200 years, to when Canada’s French settlers were routed by the British army on a Quebec field called the Plains of Abraham, and what had been New France fell to the British crown. The British conquerors told French Canadians they could go on speaking French and practicing Roman Catholicism, but the new subjects deeply feared assimilation nevertheless.

“It’s the whole theme of these people: the quest for survival,” says Nick Auf der Maur, a Montreal city councilor and social commentator.

In 1968 Quebec set up a provincial Ministry of Immigration, and a decade later it negotiated the right to manage its own immigration policy, separate from that of the federal government. Foreigners seeking a new life in Canada can apply to either the central government or Quebec, or both.

If the central government turns down a candidate and Quebec accepts him, the immigrant comes to Canada--and he doesn’t have to stay in Quebec.

Quebec isn’t taking this lying down. In addition to sending teachers like Stephanie Martin off to Thailand to indoctrinate future first-generation Quebec residents, the province has passed a law requiring all immigrant children to attend French schools. Now there is talk of new regulations to ban all non-French conversation in Quebec school hallways, restrooms and playgrounds.

In English Canada, Quebec’s French-only restrictions and its treatment of immigrants are cited in the ongoing constitutional debate as evidence that the province tends to abuse power.

Such arguments only convince Quebec citizens that English Canadians will never understand them.

“We have to be firm, very firm, and not change overnight because someone tells us we’re a little weak on civil rights,” said Gerald LeBlanc, a French-language newspaper columnist. “When you’re only 2% of the continent, you need a law to survive. If the immigrants don’t learn French and stay with us, we’re done.”