Newport Municipal Hall.
During their meetings on June 7, the municipal councils of Bury and Newport both voted unanimously in favour of a resolution to retain their bilingual status. They are the only two “bilingual” municipalities in the Haut-Saint-François MRC, and their councils are comprised of both French and English speakers.
Bilingual status legally allows munipalities to communicate with their citizens in both French and English, whether via signage, tax bills, email, newsletters, website or in person.
The Bury and Newport resolutions were in response to Bill 96, introduced last month in the National Assembly of Quebec by the Minister Responsible for the French Language, Mr. Simon Jolin-Barrette.
The government bill proposes a number of revisions to Quebec’s French Language Charter (Bill 101), including one that would automatically revoke the bilingual status of municipalities if the number of its citizens “whose mother tongue is English” falls below 50 percent of the population. To avoid this, a bilingual municipality would need to pass a resolution to keep its status, and do this within 120 days after Bill 96 is passed. Passage of the bill could happen before the end of 2021.
The current law allows municipalities to keep their bilingual status even if the number of their citizens whose mother tongue is “a language other than French” falls below 50 percent. Bilingual status is withdrawn only upon a municipality’s request. In the past, very few of the municipalities with bilingual status have requested this, said Minister Jolin-Barrette.
Under Bill 96, about 50 of the current 90 or so bilingual municipalities and boroughs in Quebec would lose their status unless they adopt a resolution to conserve it.
A telephone survey by Le Devoir found that fewer than five of these municipalities would let go of their bilingual status. Following the example of Côte-Saint-Luc in the Montreal region, many municipalities have already passed resolutions to retain their bilingual status, even before Bill 96 has passed into law.
As of the 2016 census, 29 percent of the people living in Newport, and 28 percent of Bury’s population, identified their “first official language spoken” as English. Under a “mother tongue English” definition, the percentage could be even lower, omitting citizens whose first language was other than English, but who now speak English in their homes, work or school.
Both municipal councils modeled their resolutions on that of Côte-Saint-Luc, which decried the new law’s “narrow definition of the English-speaking community,” and other modifications to the current law. Both resolutions pointed to bilingual status “as essential to the character of the municipality and as witness to the historic presence of the two communities, English-speaking and French-speaking, in the municipality.”
Mayor Walter Dougherty of Bury said that “even municipalities without bilingual status are obligated to communicate to citizens in languages other than French if it is a safety issue, such as a water advisory. I see Bill 96 as eroding more and more our rights to English-language services.”
“It’s an issue of health and safety, even if only five percent of the population do not speak French,” he said. “Our families have intermingled, everybody kind of gets along. I find it sad and disappointing. It’s a shame they’re opening up this can of worms.”
Mayor Lionel Roy of Newport said passing the resolution was “without doubt, an easy decision. We consider ourselves to be a bilingual municipality, and we want to keep it like that. Everybody was unanimous.”
