MONTREAL — In 2019, Leticia Garcia-Lavoie graduated from a small French high school in Montreal. She applied to Dawson College, one of Quebec’s six English finishing schools—known as CEGEPs—because she wanted to bone up on her second language. “I wanted to go to a big school where I could speak English with a lot of different people,” she told me recently.

“Quebec student bones up on her English” isn’t much of a headline. Yet Garcia-Lavoie’s is one of many students challenging a persistent myth in Quebec, which remains unable to escape the same tired language battles and associated Two Solitudes-style clichés. That myth: that Quebecers are stuck in the victimized thrall of their English-speaking oppressors, who in turn exist only to denigrate and otherwise dilute the French language.

Today, 76 years after the publication of Hugh MacLennan’s book, these clichés continue to inform the province’s politics. Earlier this year, the governing Coalition Avenir Québec proposed Bill 96, which, among other things, would restrict French-speaking students from attending English CEGEPs. The reasoning, as per usual, is of the zero-sum variety: the bill’s proponents hold that English-school necessarily erodes one’s ability to live and work in French.

Should it become law, the government would cap the number of French students allowed to enroll in English CEGEPs at 17.5 per cent. Further, the bill would give priority admission to English CEGEPs to English speakers. “We expect that with these changes we can increase the use of French in Quebec,” said Premier François Legault in May.

Yet by throttling access to English-language education, Legault isn’t striking a blow against the mythical anglais-spitting boogeyman of yore. In fact, he’s stymying Francophone Quebecers themselves, and their desire to participate in the global innovation economy.

A funny thing about clichés: eventually, they cease ringing true. The number of Francophone students attending English CEGEPs more than doubled between 1993 and 2015, according to a report from the Office québécois de la langue française. At Dawson, Quebec’s largest CEGEP, Francophone students now represent anywhere from 17 to 22 per cent of the incoming students every year, according to a college spokesperson I spoke with. 

One of the sources of Dawson’s Francophone heft sits just down the street, within the walls of Collège de Montréal, the centuries-old alma mater of Quebec-born poets, patriotes and prime ministers. “Last year, 30 per cent of the 210 graduates said they were going to English CEGEP,” guidance counselor Nathalie Théberge told me. “And it’s around 30 per cent every year.”

The reasons behind this surge in demand for English post-secondary school bode well for the province’s future. According to Le Code Québec, a 2016 book that parses Quebec’s demographic identities, younger French-speaking Quebecers are better educated, more bilingual and multicultural than their forebears, and comparatively complex-free. 

Coincidentally or not, they aren’t nearly as encumbered by the boomer-era aversion to English. In 2013, the then-governing Parti Québécois introduced a proposed law similar to the CAQ’s Bill 96, only to have French-speaking parents and politicians beat it back. English is less the oppressor’s language than the language of business—and certainly of the tech sector, for which Dawson is a burgeoning pipeline, having won praise for its AI literacy initiative. 

What’s more, counter to the CAQ’s contention, learning English does bupkis to compromise one’s French identity, according to a 2019 Université Laval thesis study. All of this suggests there is a best-before date to the practice of tongue-baiting for votes in the province. “It’s the end of the baby boomer reign,” as Le Code Québec put it.

Sadly, French-speaking opposition to Bill 96 has been scant, to say the least. The opposition Liberals are all for it. The Parti Québécois doesn’t think the proposed law goes far enough. Valérie Plante, the mayor of Montreal—home to the most of those English CEGEPs and the near entirety of the province’s English universities—called the bill a “strong gesture,” and declared herself an ally of the reform.

To his great credit, Michel Leblanc, the president of the Chamber of Commerce of Metropolitan Montreal,dared critique the proposed law earlier this month. While in an Oct. 6 brief to the National Assembly, the Quebec chapter of the Council of Canadian Innovators delicately acknowledged the government’s attempts to protect the French language before pointing out the blatantly obvious: should it pass into law as written, Bill 96 would wreak bureaucratic havoc on the province’s tech sector, particularly its small- and medium-sized businesses. “It’s generating a lot of stress amongst our students,” Théberge told me. “Many want to go to an English university and for them, English CEGEP is key to getting in.”

Bill 96 will in all likelihood pass into law. Unlike the PQ government of yore, Legault’s CAQ is a majority government. Tired as it is, tongue-baiting still sells newspapers, and the politicians who espouse it still get plenty of airtime. I’ve been writing about Quebec language and identity issues for much of my career, in no small part because of their car-crash allure. Want to watch a government push for state secularism while standing under a giant, honking crucifix in the National Assembly? Care to see another government attempt to sabotage a highly successful immigrant-retention program in the midst of a chronic labour shortage? Come to Quebec. The water is plenty warm.

Thankfully, there are people like Garcia-Lavoie. “I don’t see how learning a second language hurts your native language,” she told me. She’s at McGill now, studying political science. She’s not sure what she wants to do with her life just yet, but is seriously considering journalism. “That way I can criticize political decisions like these,” she says.