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Doug Sweet's avatar

Paul, a very welcome deep dive into a complex issue that is important not only for Quebec, but for the rest of the country, in that the government's new discriminatory tuition policy could, as senior academics have said, provoke tit-for-tat responses from other provinces for students from Quebec. But in your post-interview conversation with Kevin, I think you overstated the degree to which "angryphones" represent the English-speaking community of Quebec these days. While you acknowledge that successive governments have continued to move the goalposts for anglo Quebecers (it is no longer enough to speak French in public; one must speak it at home – which takes us down a brand new rabbit hole), your tendency to characterize the ESCQ as feeling entitled to speak English here is, in my experience of nearly 40 years living here, exaggerated. Anglos and their organizations support the goal of preserving and protecting French in Quebec, just as the universities demonstrated in their counterproposal to the tuition policy, a counterproposal that has been met with a mostly negative reaction so far. Yes, there are angryphone voices, but they are a minority of the minority. Recent stats from the Commissioner of Official Languages show 94% of the Quebec population can speak French; only 5% of anglos can't and 90% of anglos use French in one or more areas of their daily lives. But having a government paying attention to which language I'm speaking at home bothers the hell out of me.

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John Macmillan's avatar

More and more I think of Legault’s university gambits as indicative of what I call “Schrödinger’s Province”, where competing ideas can be true at once-- we want more students to come paying higher tuition, but the influx of out of province students threatens our culture; we want them to pay more and still come, but we’re angry when they get educated and leave; but we don’t want them to stay either, since that warps the fabric of our ‘pur laine’. So, come, despite the price, but don’t stay. Unless you do, which we want. Sorta. Meanwhile, kudos to the leaders of both Concordia and the UdeM for trying to make sense of this.

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