But such things have happened, and there’s a present-day example very
close to home.
In 1763, the French withdrew from North America and at that point
Canada became a British possession. The British colonial policy was to
make the world England, and that process began immediately with a new
English-speaking government and upper class dominating business and
social circles. With the immigration of large numbers of British people,
business trade shifted away from the traditional French merchants; the fate
of the French who had been in Quebec since the first European settlements
were made clear: you must assimilate.
French speakers were shut out of the most influential aspects of official
life, and a tiered system developed in which Anglophones (English
speakers, the British) constituted the governing classes; to be a
Francophone was to be associated with the laboring classes. Francophones
were at a marked disadvantage in every way; their children were
segregated from Anglophone schoolchildren and had fewer possibilities in
terms of education and training.
Of course, French did not die out. A large, healthy, well-established
language community does not simply buckle under in the face of
governmental decree. The Francophone population regrouped and began to
find their way back.
In 1974, a new Francophone-dominant province government passed an
Official Language Act with the intention of making French the normal,
everyday language of work, instruction, communication, commerce and
business. Another Bill (Loi 101) was passed in 1977 which went into much
greater detail. In fact, all of the provisions suggested above were included,
almost word for word in Bill 101.^16
As is so often the tendency when power structures are concentrated in a
small section of the community, the oppressed had become the oppressors
(Freire 2000 [1970]).^17 The Francophone government asserted its right to
exclude all things Anglophone, and they do so still. One example of many
is Bob Rice’s story.
A Québécois from birth and an Anglophone, Bob ran into trouble with
an apostrophe, and it cost him dearly.
One day in 2004, Bob Rice received a ticket in the mail. Its intention
wasn’t very clear, but eventually he figured out that he was being fined by
the Office Québécois de la langue française (Quebec Office of the French