by R.A. Garber

Exceptional people walk among us.

I’m referring to the citizens of the 91 municipalities (or boroughs within cities) in Quebec which have bilingual status. Among these are 16 in the Eastern Townships, including two in the Haut-Saint-François. They are Bury and Newport.

The Office de la langue française website (oqlf.gouv.qc.ca) lists these exceptional municipalities. It’s legal.
In 2022, the Quebec government’s Bill 96 proposed to revoke this status for municipalities where fewer than 50 percent of the citizens had English as a mother tongue, unless the municipal council passed a resolution to the contrary. Very quickly, all the municipalities in question passed resolutions to conserve their right to provide services in both French and English.

My hat is off to those councils and the citizens who supported them in this decision. I appreciate their willingness to serve their mostly aging English-speaking population in English. Could it be that these municipal governments felt capable of deciding how to best serve their citizens, and wished to continue doing so?

So a few weeks ago, many Lennoxville citizens were puzzled about the borough’s new directive to carry out a verbal verification of their eligibility before serving someone in English. Within the City of Sherbrooke, the Borough of Lennoxville has bilingual status.

Now we have clarification: The Bill 14 language directive stipulating who may be served in a language other than French does not apply to municipalities with legal bilingual status. The City of Sherbrooke told news media that, because of its bilingual status, the Borough of Lennoxville will not be required to conduct verbal verification of citizens to be served in English. (The City is to table a corrected directive for Lennoxville at its council meeting on July 7.)

This also applies to our two municipalities with bilingual status, Bury and Newport.

But not to the 12 municipalities in our MRC without bilingual status: Ascot Corner, Cookshire-Eaton, Chartierville, Dudswell, East Angus, Hampton, La Patrie, Lingwick, Saint-Isidore-de-Clifton, Scotstown, Weedon, and Westbury. There, under the new law, English speakers can expect to be asked – scout’s honour – if they meet one of the eligibility criteria to receive services in a language other than French. (The June 17th Rachel Writes lists these criteria).

Truth be told, there’s nowhere on earth I am not a minority, an exception. So I fit nicely, I think, in the exceptional municipality of Newport.