Raymond Hébert, a professor at Collège universitaire de Saint-Boniface, was passionately engaged as a participant-observer in the divisive debate he documents regarding the proposed constitutional entrenchment of French-language government services in Manitoba in 1983–4. When his family settled in Manitoba in the 1880s, the skeletal provincial government operated under a constitutionally bilingual regime in the context of increasingly explosive Ontarian immigration that refashioned provincial society. Forgotten by most followers of Canadian politics, the raucous controversy meticulously examined in this book came close to paralyzing the NDP government. Hébert's reconstructed imbroglio builds well on documented sources but, oddly, he only interviewed participants supportive of the changes and not their opponents.
Hébert forsakes fitting his narrative into an overarching abstract theoretical explanatory model (he considered but discarded Adorno's “authoritarian personality”) and settles on telling a good, sobering story. Nevertheless, he tries in his concluding chapter to understand the crisis in terms of its symbolism and place in the ethnic pecking order that enveloped Manitoba. He points to Raymond Bréton's Canadian application of status symbolism—that individuals expect something of their private identities to be reflected and embedded in their public institutions. He also makes good use of Robert Altemeyer's psychological work on right-wing authoritarianism. The analysis recalls Richard Hofstadter's characterization of American political paranoia: “heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy” (211).
Hébert demonstrates how the provincial Conservatives, seeking political advantage, unleashed a populist torrent of ethnic bigotry. Some long-time NDP stalwarts broke with the party, retired Liberal politicians waded in, and sundry unsavoury characters joined the anti-French parade. As in Ontario later in the decade, municipal politicians used plebiscites to delegitimize minority aspirations. Opponents skillfully deployed spurious arguments and code words like “secret deal.” Conservative leader Sterling Lyon labelled the proposed constitutional amendment a “form of tyranny” and his party pursued a policy that poisoned public opinion. The Société Franco-Manitobaine (SFM), which negotiated the amendment with the government, had its offices torched, graffiti was sprayed on Saint Boniface buildings, death threats were uttered, and personal insults were hurled at a francophone government MLA. We learn, surprisingly, that the SFM had backed the “Yes” side in the 1980 Quebec referendum. Amidst liberal doses of slanderous venom, mass opposition demonstrations were organized.
The introductory chapter, reviewing the treatment of French-language rights between the 1870s and 1970s, stresses how those negotiated rights were ignored and overridden by courts and politicians notwithstanding some lower court victories by francophones (which were only uncovered in recent years). You would never know from this account, however, that the much-maligned legislation abrogating those limited rights was introduced by a Franco-Manitoban Attorney General or that the Franco-Manitoban Chief Justice described the operative language regime in the courts in the 1960s as “pas de problème.” Nor would you know that Franco-Manitobans were overrepresented in the legislature, that French was spoken freely in the legislature and courts despite it being legally verboten, and that Franco-Manitoban culture was more vibrant in the first half of the twentieth century, when francophone rights were non-existent in law, than in the second half when they were resurrected and liberally funded by governments. (See my “The Questionable Relevance of the Constitution in Advancing Minority Cultural Rights in Manitoba,” this Journal xxv [1992]: 697–721). Nevertheless, Hébert's concluding chapter appreciates how Manitoba changed after the nineteenth century: virtually every resident came to use English as the common linguistic denominator. Franco-Manitobans, who composed roughly half the population at the creation of the province, came to be one of many ethnic groups, outnumbered by Germans and Ukrainians.
The lesson I take from this cautionary tale—one that national politicians foolishly ignored in rushing headlong into the Meech Lake and Charlottetown debacles—is that iterative administrative and statutory measures are more efficacious, practical and politic than the pursuit of formal constitutional change. The high politics of constitutional amendment invites high-blown drama because of its symbolic freight. Indeed, Hébert's penultimate paragraph acknowledges “Only the words ‘official languages’ are missing from the Manitoba Act; the reality is that in all significant respects, Manitoba is now officially bilingual” (221).
The book's strength and weakness lie in its detail. The riveting shockers like death threats and arson will startle readers who think of Canada as a tolerant, stable, peaceable and reasonable democracy. However, the minutiae of negotiations that bore little fruit and the positions of people whose opinions were of little weight are boring. Overall, this is a solid, commendable work that reminds us how tenuous democracy is when linguistic animosity swirls about. Then again, for Franco-Manitobans and Manitoba generally, there was a happy conclusion: the issue and crisis faded as quickly as they had been stirred up.
