My name is Marc Ryan, I am the founder of the website BONHOUR MERCI Québec (BMQC.org). A lawyer by training, I began my career first with the government of Quebec, then, and above all, at the head office of a major telecommunications company then located in Montreal.
In retirement, I published for a long time a website InvestisseurAutonome.info (IndependentInvestor.info). Its the mission was providing free online information helping individuals interested in managing their own investments using an index-investing approach. From this site, I learned that Internet users appreciate a site which centralizes information on a complex subject in one place. The relative dearth of information in French on a subject like investing often resulted in French speaking investors in particular being more inclined to use such a site. The site is closed; only the Twitter account DIYInvestor still exists, but is now used to comment on linguistic news and promote the use of French.
With this site, I hope to attract French and English speakers to a site that promotes the use of French in Quebec. The origin of the name of the site is due to a symbolic, and not substantive, practice at the federal level of starting meetings with a warm Bonjour in French, accompanied by an invitation to speak French at all times, followed at the end by words of thanks (Merci) again warmly expressed in French. Between the two, the real business is done, in English. The song Bonjour-Merci by the group Arcadian (which, despite its name, was not Acadian, but Franco-Swiss) that we invite our readers to listen to, reminds us of the difficulty for French speakers of living in an environment of Bonjour-Merci .
The motto of Quebec is Je me souviens ( I remember). In 1896, Ernest Gagnon wrote: “[the motto] admirably summarizes the reason for the existence of the Canada of Champlain and Maisonneuve as a distinct province in the confederation8”. It was recognized by the Supreme Court of Canada (Supreme Court of Canada in 1998 in the Secession Reference, paragraph 59.) that one of the goals of Confederation for French-speakers, a goal accepted by the other English-speaking provinces, at the time was to have in Quebec a majority French-speaking society, the only one in the British Empire, which would have the motivation and the political power to promote the language of the majority. And with all due respect to our French-speaking compatriots in the ROC (Rest of Canada, a term we will use repeatedly), the number of French-speaking people in the other provinces at the time was insignificant, with the exception of the Acadians who were still recovering from their great and noble expulsion from Acadia (in french, Le Grand dérangement), and were completely left out of the negotiations for confederation. The promotion of French at the time was a Quebec-only affair.
The site advocates for the promotion of the use of French in Quebec. It is wrong to treat English as being on an equal footing with French in Quebec. And it is wrong to deny that one of the legitimate goals of the confederation is to allow QC to take the necessary actions to preserve both its French-speaking majority and the French character of Quebec. To deny these two facts is to want to rewrite history. For more on the site's philosophy, see About us.
I believe that French must be the common language in Quebec, i.e. the main language of use in Quebec. There are two major obstacles. The first, the global hegemony of English. We must accept this reality, without losing the motivation to use French as much as possible. The second, an institutional system which limits Quebec's room for maneuver and which can undermine the motivation to use French by a significant part of the population. I believe in a single public school system in Quebec, as are the public systems of our neighbors in the USA, or of the so-called founding countries of Canada, France and the United Kingdom (UK). I oppose our current public school system which is segregated on a linguistic basis. I believe that the current system encourages a significant minority to exclude itself from Quebec society. It is divisive and non-inclusive. It is at the origin of many of the current linguistic conflicts in Quebec. If there is a society in the world where the language of the main minority does not need special protection, it is Quebec: the language of this minority, English, is also that of the majority in Canada and America, and moreover is the language that has become hegemonic throughout the world. Current Canadian federalism should demonstrate greater flexibility, which has often not been the case. Why to seek, and how to achieve, such a single school system is one of the recurring themes of this site.
I intend to regularly publish articles on the site on the past, present and future use of French in Quebec and elsewhere. You can read them without classification, or by categories: feature article; document of the day; quote of the day; A picture is worth a thousand words; or videos.
If you have any comments, please send them to me at Contact.
