Quebec's Dangerous Language Fantasyland

Excited politicians anxious to smack down MP who insulted language dogma 

The language Ayatollahs of Quebec were up in arms once again, outraged that federal Liberal MP Emmanuella Lambropoulos called into question whether French was actually in decline in Quebec. The Quebec MP represents a linguistically and ethnically diverse Montreal riding and was roundly chastised for saying out loud what many of us think.
Unlike the little boy in the fable of the emperor who wore no clothes, her revelation wasn't exactly embraced, in fact, quite the opposite. Her missive was so toxic that politicians of every single political party ran for cover, distancing themselves from her as if she was radioactive. She was summarily dumped from a Parliamentary language committee for having the temerity of expressing a forbidden opinion,  summarily 'cancelled,' in the best tradition of the French revolution where those whose ideologies ran afoul of the mob were burned at the stake.

While we scoff and condemn extremist Muslim societies that persecute apostates, homosexuals, feminists and others who dissent, it is fair to ask if we ourselves are headed in that exact direction? 

At any rate, the missive was manna from Heaven for Quebec language militants, another opportunity to display moral outrage and somehow reclaim the high ground in the phoney language and cultural war. The predictable reaction was swift and hysterical, worthy of religious fanatics in dysfunctional Muslim countries who defend Islam as the only true faith. 

Blaming Canada in general and Quebec Anglophones, allophones and immigrants in particular for manufactured language slights has been the policy of the defeated sovereigntist movement ever since the last referendum. Carrying on the fight for independence, militants have had to pivot, recognizing that support for the independence option is at its nadir and so they hope to keep the embers of sovereignty alive by fanning the flames of manufactured language discontent. 

For the last forty years, sovereigntists have been alluding to an omnipresent evil English world cultural juggernaut which they purport will ultimately destroy Quebec, setting themselves up as David fighting the English Goliath in a game where the ultimate goal is not to win an unwinnable fight but rather to lose as loudly, painfully and humiliatingly as possible in an effort to raise the dormant hackles of Quebec francophones more interested in pursuing their daily lives in peace...and within Canada.
This strategy was invented by the infamous Dr. Camille Laurin, father of Bill 101, the language law he designed with built-in anti-constitutional clauses that were meant to engender the inevitable court reversals with the sole idea that these humiliating defeats would provoke outrage in the francophone community, boosting the chances of success in the upcoming referendums.

This victimhood strategy is tiresome and tedious and only persists because Canada indulges the fantasy. Like the Israeli government which is hamstrung by an ultra-religious minority that controls the balance of power with a meagre 10% of the voter base, Quebec leverages its position between Liberal Ontario and Conservative west to its advantage and wrests concessions beyond its demographic weight.

No federal political party dares challenge the fantasy of the supposed dire situation of French in Quebec and so the faulty concept of an imperiled language situation in Quebec has gone unchallenged on pain of cancellation. Miss Lambropoulos is proof.

I've written before about how Quebec language nationalists absolve themselves from responsibility to protect and promote their own language, preferring to blame everyone else.  The Quebec government and the entire political cadre, aided and abetted by the compliant media, continue to offer an utterly false language narrative, a fantasy easy to sell and indeed easy to buy, where 'les Autres' are cast as villains and the 'pur and dur' the protagonists, fighting the good fight.

The current language distortion cast by the sovereignty and language movement 'proving' that Quebec is under attack is the statistic showing French declining as the mother tongue as spoken in the home.
With 50,000 new immigrants arriving in Quebec each year, most of all who speak French outside the home but who have another mother tongue, usually Arabic or Spanish, it is inevitable that the statistic about mother tongue declines.
But it in no way indicates that French in Quebec is declining, rather it is the 'Quebecois pure stock' component of society that is declining, a fact that really offends militants but something they cannot allude to in public.
The French language in Quebec society actually remains stronger than ever despite efforts to disguise the fact through selective and self-serving statistics. Every day more people speak French than the day before and the critical mass required to maintain French as the social language is stronger than ever. 
For sovereigntists and language militants it is the ultimate inconvenient truth.

The latest language tiff was sprung by an idiotic article in Le Journal de Montreal that had as its premise the idea that getting served in French was harder and harder in downtown Montreal.
The reporter offered some very unscientific observations of her visits, failing to disclose exactly how the stores were chosen and whether they were pre-screened, which I imagine they were. 

Since the whole idea behind the article was to find fault, the likely faulty unscientific methodology was purposely left undisclosed and so the results are not only unreliable but downright deceptive.
But the conclusions were embraced by an eager media which ran the story because it fits neatly into its narrative and helps boost ratings, a useful distraction from the daily litany of bad news vis-a-vis Covid-19.
Utter nonsense.

Tell the big lie, rinse and repeat has been the go-to policy of the sovereignty movement for the last forty years.
The device invented by Adolf Hitler who in his book Mein Kampf described it as the "use of a lie so "colossal" that no one would believe that someone "could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously".

To our astonishment, we've seen Donald Trump employ the 'big lie' to outrageously distort the truth about his election defeat. It is just stunning to see how many people choose to believe his nonsense in the face of the unbridled truth.

In Quebec, we are living the same phenomenon, a big lie that tells us French is declining in Quebec when nothing could be farther from the truth.

Sadly our politicians and journalists, both French and English, are too weak to denounce the practice and fight for the truth.
Where is our Emile Zola to boldly tell the truth when all others shirk away from the responsibility?