Bill 14 could have direct impact on three Montreal municipalities

MONTREAL – In the wake of PQ’s proposed Bill 14, Edward Janiszewski, the mayor of Dollard-des-Ormeaux, has suddenly developed a new interest: statistics.

“We have a third anglophone, a quarter francophone and the balance are ethnic,” he said. The PQ government “doesn’t want to count the ethnics even though most of them speak English.”

If passed, Bill 14 would require that bilingual cities have at least 50 percent of their populace with English as a mother tongue. The bill would also demand that the census would trigger a review process if a bilingual municipality’s anglophone populace sinks below 50 percent.

With almost 50,000 residents, DDO is the largest West Island community independent of Montreal. Three other bilingual municipalities on the island could also be targets of the bill should it pass – Côte St-Luc, Dorval and the Town of Mount Royal. 

“It’s a bad piece of legislation, I’d like to see it not brought into law,” said Harold Chorney, a politics professor at Concordia University. “It just exacerbates linguistic tensions.”

Chorney himself is a DDO resident.

“I mean, if you’re going to be harassed in your own home, and be told that somehow the other official language of Canada is somehow an evil thing, I mean how many people are going to want to stick around here?”

Karin Marks was the mayor of Westmount from 2001-09, and guided the city through the demerger process after it was agglomerated into the city of Montreal under the previous PQ government. She views the bill as a continuation of that debate.

“The sense or the sentiment of having one’s rights diminished once again is very offensive, and unnecessary,” she said.

She said the demerger vote, to her, was really a referendum on someone’s right to feel at home.

“People came out in huge numbers because of that. This is where they felt they had a real belonging,” she said.

Quebec’s minister for Montreal, Jean-François Lisée, said Thursday in Westmount he wants to work with anglophones, and has publicly stated the English-threshold should be 40 percent if the bill is passed.