Manitoba's French-Language Crisis: A Cautionary Tale (review)

'May God save the Queen and damn the French!' So proclaimed the daily prayer of one of the many thousands of embittered Manitoban francophobes at the peak of the political crisis over the restoration of the Franco-Manitobans' constitutional language rights, Section 23 of the Manitoba Act, 1870. Despite the outpouring of venomous rhetoric and undiluted hatred, the Franco-Manitoban community, deprived of its constitutional language rights since 1890, stood firm if not always united and emerged victorious. Canada's Supreme Court justices, in their landmark 13 June 1985 Reference re Language Rights under Section 23 of the Manitoba Act decision proclaimed Section 23 rights to be mandatory. The ruling, which required the costly translation of countless thousands of pages of documents, set the stage for a successful negotiated deal – arbitrated by the Supreme Court – between the Manitoba government and the Société franco-manitobaine (SFM).

Paradoxically, the deal – which was based on a quid pro quo entailing far less translation in return for a long overdue and very necessary range of statutory, none constitutionally entrenched, French-language ser- vices – resembled in many of its features the SFM's proposal at the very outset of the crisis. A vindictive and destructive anti-francophone hybrid elitist/populist movement quickly coalesced to prevent both the restoration of Section 23 rights and the creation of French-language provincial government services. The movement failed but, in the process, inflicted severe damage on Manitoba's carefully constructed image of a tolerant, welcoming, and just society.

One might be pardoned for thinking that in the liberalizing environment of Canadian society in the 1980s the restoration of violated constitutional language rights reinforced with modern services should have been a relatively straightforward task for the NDP Pawley government. Hébert quickly disabuses his readers of any illusions they might harbour in this regard. This superbly crafted and lucidly analysed narrative study offers two interrelated explanations for the severity of the crisis. The first addresses the status/symbolism model, while the second focuses on the authoritarian political culture of Manitoba's conservative elites. Manitoban prairie society was a very particular subset of the larger Canadian society, thanks to its distinctive history of mixed settlement and regional hardships. From the very outset, the dominant British-Canadian Protestant community from Ontario and the United Kingdom was successful in imposing its melting-pot, Anglo-conformity values, norms, and institutions on the French-Canadian Catholic Métis and Protestant half-breeds, and then, after 1890, on a wide range of European ethno-cultural, linguistic, and religious communities. In the 1970s and 1980s, the Trudeau federal government challenged Manitoba's Anglo-Canadian community's longstanding appropriation of status and symbolism with its bilingualism and multiculturalism programs in the 1970s, both of which were entrenched in the Constitution Act, 1982, along with its foreign, i.e., 'American,' Charter of Rights and Freedoms. These developments set off a veritable political firestorm of prairie protest, populist and elitist.

It is Hébert's contention that Manitoba's political class — led by British-Canadian Conservative premiers, Sterling Lyon and Gary Filmon, and a prominent renegade NDPer, Charles Doern, who embraced Anglo conformity — was largely responsible for the unwarranted, fundamentally undemocratic, manufactured crisis that erupted over the Pawley NDP government's proposed 1984–5 amendments to Section 23 of the Manitoba Act, 1870. The authoritarian Lyon, fresh from his humiliating defeat at the hands of Trudeau, followed by his successor, Filmon, deliberately plugged into and whipped up the always present undercurrent of rural, right-wing populism as a means of defeating the NDP government. Both were determined to prevent, at great political and social costs, the designation of Manitoba as an officially bilingual province and the entrenchment of any language services. One might profitably add that their secondary objective was to prevent the implementation of the other Section 23, of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, one that mandated French-language education – classes, schools, and, following...