THE FRENCH CANADIAN LANGUAGE CULTURE

Quebec, many would argue, has become a virtual state within the state. Among the other achievements that are often cited as the Québecois' coming of age is the emergence of a genuine, homegrown. French-speaking business elite with ever increasing socioeconomic clout. Artistic, literary, and scientific manifestations of their distinctive culture have won Québecois international acclaim within and outside the frasncophone world. Clearly, Québecois have developed and consolidated a vibrant culture of their own, solidly entrenched in the parameters of modernity.

The making of Canada into an officially bilingual (English and French) country in 1969 was partly meant to address Quebec's understanding of the Canadian federation and correct, at least symbolically, some of the socioeconomic inequality historically suffered by all French-speaking Canadians (not only those living in Quebec). It implicity recognized the social and political importance of the French constituency in Canada by giving them the right to state services in their own language from Victoria to St. John's, However, it also implied that English-speaking Canadians should equally expect to have access to state services in their mother tongue in predominantly French-speaking Quebec.

Indeed the official bilingualization of Canada, just like the policies on multiculturalism that were to follow in the 1970s and 1980s, and the Constitutional Reform Act of 1982, were all premised on a narrow egalitarian conception of society and politics: Canada is comprised of a large variety of people with different ethnocultural backgrounds; they must cherish their different and distinct individuality, they must respect each other's right to express it but, at the end of the day, they are all Canadians and they must all be treated equally by the federal state, their ultimate representative. Quebec cultural and immigration policies are the products of a fundamentally contradictory and ambiguous approach while the state pretends to include, it excludes by pigeonholding people into ethnocutural categories outside which their existence seems unjustified. In fact, such policies proceed from an inrrevocable tendency to typecast ehthnocultural communities into static socioeconomic roles. In the final analysis, this tendency only fragments and divides society; it results in increased tensions between Québecois and others. This essentialism results in increased political tensions between Québecois and others. Strengthened by the official recognition granted them, cultural communities feel vindicated in questioning and even opposing the monopoly Québecois claim to have on the social and political definition of Quebec. While intercultural and interethnic relations in Quebec have not yet had disproportionate consequences, the potential for damaging, irremediable conflicts is real. The armed standoff of the summer of 1990 between the Canadian army and Mohawk Indians as Oka, just outside of Montreal, stands as a reminder of the fragility of pluriethnicity and pluriculturalism in Quebec. The sad, public displays of racial intolerance which became the trademark of the "Oka crisis" did nothing to alleviate mounting tensions between Québecois and Quebec's aboriginal communities.