MONTREAL A new final word has come down over Bill 99, the twenty-year-old law meant to enshrine Quebec’s right to self-determination and, potentially, separation. But the appeal court ruling on Friday stepped away from allowing any present-day judge to give a final word at all, saying politics is too unpredictable. In short, Quebec Court of Appeal judge Robert Mainville wrote that Bill 99 is just fine unless it’s used in the future in some unforseeable way, such as unilaterally separating from Canada, in which case the courts of the future will need to deal with that for themselves. It s illegal under federal law for a province to unilaterally separate. What’s unclear is if Quebec will always respect that federal law.
MONTREAL The Quebec organization with a mission to promote and defend the French language is calling the Legault government s plan to cap English CEGEP spots a false good idea. The Mouvement Quebec francais opposes Francois Legault s plan to establish quotas at English CEGEPs to resolve the language problem at the college level. More broadly, the MQF has had enough of the endless wanderings and procrastination of the CAQists on the linguistic file and especially on the crying issue of the anglicization of higher education in Quebec, the MQF said in a news release. The MQF added that French will likely be in the minority for college students in Montreal come fall, and that the idea of capping spots at English-speaking CEGEPs is a thousand miles from being sturdy, and turns out to be, on the contrary, dangerously puny, wobbly and ill-advised.