Raymond M. HÖ©bert. Manitoba’s French-Language Crisis: A Cautionary Tale. Montreal and Kingston: McGill- een’s University Press, 2004. xvi + 296 pp. $75.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-7735-2708-9; $29.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0- 7735-2790-4.
Reviewed by Mahew Hayday (Centre for Canadian Studies, Mount Allison University) Published on H-Canada (February, 2006)
Bigotry and Bilingualism in Manitoba: A Warning to Canadians
In the late 1970s, many English-speaking Canadi- ture while responding to court rulings that deemed the ans were outraged at ebec’s Bill 101, the Charte de 1890 Act unconstitutional. e thrust of the court deci- la langue française. is piece of language legislation, sions on the Forest and Bilodeau cases was that all legis- passed by the Parti ébécois, restricted the use of En- lation and government regulations passed solely in En- glish on public signs in the province, limited access to glish since 1890 were invalid. e primary focus is the English-language education, and took numerous other period from 1983 to 1984, when the NDP government led steps to ensure the primacy of the French language in by Howard Pawley aempted to broker a compromise ebec. e legislation was immediately subject to le- solution with the federal government, Roger Bilodeau, gal challenges from groups who argued that Bill 101 vi- and the Société franco-manitobaine (SFM). ese efforts olated the constitution. Amidst the maelstrom of me- would be met with hostility and parliamentary shenani- dia aention dedicated to the future language rights of gans from the Sterling Lyon-led Conservative opposi- ebec’s anglophone and allophone populations, a sec- tion that eventually shut down the legislative assembly ond, potentially more devastating legal challenge to Man- for twelve consecutive days in February 1984, before the itoba’s language laws was threatening the legal legiti- NDP caved in and prorogued the legislative session. macy of the Manitoba government itself, yet these events Hébert’s book is the first major scholarly account of received comparatively lile media aention outside of the 1980s language crisis in Manitoba, a welcome ad- Manitoba and ebec. A unilingual parking ticket is- dition to the journalistic accounts of Jacqueline Blay’s sued to Georges Forest in 1975 would result in over a l’Article 23 (1987), published in the immediate aer- decade of legal wrangling, hostile parliamentary games- math of the crisis, and Frances Russell’s recent book manship, and outright racism in Manitoba before cooler e Canadian Crucible (2004). It provides a reasoned heads eventually prevailed. counterpoint to the highly biased e Bale over Bilin- Manitoba’s French-Language Crisis is the long- gualism (1985) by NDP MLA and anti-bilingualism cru- awaited book adaptation of the Ph.D. thesis of Raymond sader Russell Doern. While Blay and Russell primar- Hébert, professor of political studies and Canadian stud- ily rely on journalistic accounts of the events of 1983-85 ies at St. Boniface College, University of Manitoba. to explain the Manitoba language crisis, Hébert had ac- Hébert explores the responses of a diverse group of ac- cess to the personal papers of Premier Pawley, Aorney- tors to a key pair of constitutional challenges–the For- General Roland Penner, French-language services coor- est and Bilodeau cases–which targeted the legitimacy of dinator Roger Turenne, and the lawyers for the SFM. He Manitoba’s 1890 Official Language Act, an act which ren- skilfully uses these documents to reconstruct the drama dered the province unilingual, despite provisions of the of the peak years of the crisis, granting his readers a 1870 Manitoba Act mandating a level of bilingualism in view of the intense negotiations which proceeded behind Manitoba’s legislature and courts parallel to that of e- the scenes, while not neglecting the high-profile rhetoric bec. He seeks to explain the responses of four Manitoba of the public forum that has been chronicled by others. governments–those led by Ed Schreyer, Sterling Lyon, Hébert writes from the perspective of a “participant ob- Howard Pawley, and Gary Filmon–to these court deci- server” as a Franco-Manitoban who lived through the sions, as they aempted to devise solutions that would crisis (and who has worked directly in the community preserve the legitimacy of Manitoba’s laws and legisla- both as a journalist and as the head of the Bureau de
1 H-Net Reviews l’éducation française). His sympathies clearly lie with the constitutional amendment in the fall 1984 municipal the advocates of bilingualism, but his account is gener- referenda, are less well developed. Hébert’s application ally evenhanded in its treatment of both advocates and of his theoretical framework to these groups–essentially critics. Indeed, French-language crusader Georges Forest arguing that they blindly accepted and repeated the and SFM lawyer Joseph Magnet receive their fair share of opinions of Lyon and other Conservative heavyweights, criticism for their roles in the crisis. rather than logically analyzing the bilingualism propos- e crux of the debate over the French language in als of the Manitoba government–at the end of the book Manitoba in the early 1980s was whether, faced with feels tacked on and is insufficiently fleshed out. Likewise, court decisions that Manitoba had acted unconstitution- the virulent anti-bilingualism of the provincial Conser- ally in eliminating the status of the French language in vative caucus and the diverse groups allied behind their 1890, the government should ignore the ruling; trans- cause may indeed be the result, as Hébert posits, of a co- late every single piece of legislation that had been passed hort of Manitobans, predominantly descendants of Or- since 1890 (at a cost of millions of dollars); or seek a ange Ontario selers, who feared that their symbolic sta- constitutional amendment that would permit Manitoba tus in the province as Manitoba’s “in-group” was being to avoid such a translation burden, offering concessions challenged by a reemergent bilingual Manitoba with a such as increased French-language government services new elite (pp.209-211). However, the evidence to sup- to the Franco-Manitoban community as a quid-pro-quo port this theory needed to be more explicitly developed for this reduced translation load. e Lyon government throughout the narrative. aempted to follow the first path when faced with the Forest decision. e Pawley government aempted to While the case can be made for aempting to provide follow the third, but ran into massive opposition from the reader with a complete and objective narrative, un- both the Conservative opposition and various grassroots encumbered by theoretical arguments, it is frustrating to organizations that denounced bilingualism and painted know that there existed a theoretical approach that could the SFM as an illegitimate interest group funded by Ot- have been used to explain these events, but that this was tawa. weakly presented in the final product. Hébert argues that in the wake of postmodernism, “a growing number of au- In tracing the progression of this crisis, Hébert has thors are opting for approaches that allow more room for deliberately aempted to provide what he describes as a the reader to develop his or her own analysis” (p. xii). My “narrative history,” rather than explaining these events sense is that this work would have been more dynamic through a theoretical framework. Earlier versions of and would have provided a more substantial contribu- this work employed an “authoritarian personality” the- tion to historiographical debates if the original line of ar- oretical framework to account for the backlash against gumentation had been le intact, permiing subsequent French-language rights and services in both the legisla- scholars both to benefit from Hébert’s expertise and to ture and the general population. Hébert has removed challenge his interpretations as they saw fit. most references to this theory from his book, with the ex- ception of the final two chapters, in which he puts forth Nevertheless, Hébert has wrien a compelling ac- this theory as an explanatory framework. e overall im- count of the political struggle over bilingualism in Mani- pact of this approach is somewhat unsatisfying. toba. His book is a welcome addition to the growing liter- As a narrative, Manitoba’s French-Language Crisis ature on the history of francophone minorities in Canada, is a compelling read, peppered with insights into the and to our understanding both of the political history of hypocrisy and bigotry of the rhetoric of Sterling Lyon– Canada’s provinces and of the role of the courts in the the “fire-breathing, anti-Trudeau, Charter-loathing” vil- Canadian political system. e events of the bilingual- lain of Hébert’s story (p. 71). ese elements are well ism crisis in Manitoba are an important element of the developed through the main narrative, which is then co- story of federal efforts to promote official languages in herently explained by the framework in the concluding Canada, and a crucial episode in English-French relations chapter, which places Lyon in the role of the authoritar- in Canada. Manitoba has been a key, but understudied, ian dictator. e motivations and approaches of other or- player in recent Canadian political history in the debate ganizations, such as Grassroots Manitoba and the Union over official languages and Hébert’s book will be a key of Manitoba Municipalities, which weighed in against resource to scholars interested in these questions.
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Citation: Mahew Hayday. Review of HÖ©bert, Raymond M., Manitoba’s French-Language Crisis: A Cautionary Tale. H-Canada, H-Net Reviews. February, 2006. URL: hp://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=11392
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