The Empire Within by Sean Mills

Author:Sean Mills [Mills, S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MQUP
Published: 2010-09-14T16:00:00+00:00

A QUESTION OF IMMIGRANTS?

During the 1960s, conceptions of the nation in Quebec underwent an important symbolic transformation from an ethnically defined “French-Canadian” nation to a more territorially defined nationalism, represented by Quebec as a state. With this transformation, Martin Pâquet has argued, came a new political culture and new conceptions of citizenship, as relations between the individual and society increasingly came to be defined in contractual terms rather than organic ones.103 Rather than seeing immigration as a destabilizing force for the nation, as earlier nationalists had done, many mainstream nationalists in the 1960s began to see immigration in instrumental terms. They came, in other words, to believe that the successful integration of immigrants into the francophone community was essential for the survival and development of the nation.104

The struggle against Bill 63 revolved specifically around the language in which new immigrants would be educated. It was a fight over which linguistic community in Montreal, the French or the English, would, in the face of a dramatically declining birth-rate, continue to grow.105 Leftists in Montreal consistently included immigrants in their descriptions of the oppressed in Quebec. The problem they saw was not that immigrants were refusing to integrate into a new society, but rather that they were integrating, for reasons of economic necessity, into the language and culture of the dominant power.

At the same time that debates about the place of immigrants in Quebec society brought Montreal to a standstill, however, many immigrants themselves were demanding that their voices be heard. On 12 November 1969, Kimon Valaskakis, a self-declared “néo-Québécois,” published a moving article in Le Devoir in which he described his interpretation of the debate around Bill 63. Valaskakis was encouraged to see a “long oppressed population deciding to take to the streets to demonstrate its desire to avoid fading away,” and he was convinced that the “neo-Quebecker certainly needs to assimilate into the québécois milieu.” Nonetheless, despite the excitement of the moment, he worried about the near unanimous response of civil society to Bill 63. He objected to both nationalist arguments and to the left-wing rhetoric which too easily conflated language and class on two grounds: “1) not all of the exploited are francophones; 2) not all francophones are exploited.” To the contention that language was an arm of domination, Valaskakis responded that this argument did not take adequate account of the political, economic, and military dimensions of domination, against which speaking French offered little protection. And it was not just francophones who were poor: the two ethnic groups that ranked below them, Italians and Natives, were predominantly English-speaking.106

What made Quebec unique, for Valaskakis, was that it escaped the prison of monolithism that entrapped so many other societies. Montreal symbolized “a veritable mosaic of nationalities, ideas, and points of view. Here we have an open society, and therefore a rich and fertile one. Here we have, in opposition to the old European capitals, a human dimension which is a language without nationality, an aggregate of values, a free spirit.” But

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