Entrenching Euro-Settlerism: Multiculturalism and the Politics of Nationalism in Québec

“I’m Talking Language” (But Not Race)

In my admittedly open reading of Eve Haque’s remarkable study, she casts a light on the many frayed threads hanging from the bilingualism/multiculturalism discourse in Canada; threads that beg unraveling since their apparent coherence masks a reformulation of national belonging that codifies the racialization and exclusion of people of colour and indigenous peoples. Pulling at these threads is a vital intellectual project, particularly at this juncture when colour-blindness (Bonilla-Silva 2010) and/or racial liberalism (Mills 2008), which define anti-racist analyses as themselves racist or more insidiously, as “reverse racism,” gain ascendance in society and the academy. Through her research and analysis, Haque points to the shift from race to culture, from ethnicity to language, and we now know, to the official multicultural logic that makes considerations of the persistent racial inequities in Canada nearly impossible to hear against the din of self-congratulatory cheer. We are, after all, multicultural or in the case of Québec, intercultural – open signifiers that have come to mean anti-racist, in the sense of never openly discussing, let alone tackling racism. For those working to challenge the stranglehold that such fantasies have on our national imaginations, Haque’s study offers an invaluable historical and political outline of the construction of state-based racialized logics.

Multiculturalism Within a Bilingual Framework begins with Jacques Parizeau’s remarks about “money and the ethnic vote” after the defeat of the “Yes” side in the 1995 referendum in Québec. Haque moves us beyond the now-infamous declaration, however, to Parizeau’s explanation of it in the 2003 documentary, Public Enemy Number One: “The ethnic vote – the words might not have been well chosen – but the fact is that is what happened … the non-francophone vote … I’m talking language … I’m not talking … ethnic origin or whatever … it was a language issue” (4). Instead of relying primarily on ethnicity to explain the defeat of the referendum, Parizeau enters the presumably safer political register of language. Haque uses this high-profile example effectively to situate her study: “More than a semantic slip, Parizeau’s shift onto the terrain of language to clarify and support his comments was illustrative of the convenient alibi for racial ordering that can be provided by a multicultural nation established on the foundation of a putatively open linguistic duality” (4).

She begins with this example not to hold Québec up as uniquely xenophobic – as is often the case in English Canada – but to direct the reader to her examination of the language-race-culture nexus. She asks the reader later in her introductory remarks: “How, in Canada, did language come to be the site for articulating exclusions which can no longer be stated in terms of race and ethnicity?” (4) As a scholar of Québec, I was pleased to see Haque introduce the question animating her study with the language qua race problematic.

In what follows, I discuss Québec’s counterpoint to Canadian multiculturalism: “Interculturalism.” Turning to its development allows me to develop further Haque’s arguments about the shifting relationship among culture, race, and language in the 1960s and 1970s.

Québec and the Limits of Multiculturalism

Haque expertly leads us through the formal opposition among a variety of “ethnic” organizations to the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism’s (B and B Commission) limited terms of reference and conclusions regarding Canadian society – opposition that Haque (53-71; 75-9; 149-50) convincingly connects to the eventual development and adoption of the Multiculturalism Policy. Yet, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s vision of multiculturalism also energized fierce disagreement in Québec given the already tense political atmosphere following the previous fall’s “October crisis.” The introduction of the Official Languages Act two years previous, however, muted much of the potential grassroots resistance to Trudeau’s policy given its reaffirmation of the founding role of the French language and of French Canadians/Québécois in Confederation. Still, in the long term the Canadian multicultural project was imperiled in Québec, as sociologist...