To defend against Yankee propaganda, parler en français!

Maintenant, on doit parler français au Canada, PAS anglais.

L’Hôtel du Parlement du Québec, the seat of the National Assembly. Vive la langue français, et vive le Canada libre.

This column is written in English, because it is a desperate plea to Anglo-Canadians to embrace the full promise of our country, and step outside the bounds of Anglophonic hegemony.

In the face of Donald Trump’s brazen threats to annex our country, ravage our soil, and steal our children’s future, Canadians have united ourselves against the Yankee interloper. We are beginning to regain our pride in our Canadian identity.

But there is a threat to our national consciousness, a crack in the armour which the treacherous Yankee seeks to slip their tendrils into and exploit. A large segment of the Canadian population consume American media, in some cases more than our own media.

Former President Joe Biden’s Ambassador to Canada, Mr. David Cohen, himself said that Canadians watch too much American news, specifically an “unhealthy” amount. And while it pains me to agree with this Yankee, his appraisal is unfortunately correct.

In Québec, there is a unique culture and a distinct society, because through their ardent defence of the French language, they have insulated themselves from American media.

But in the rest of Canada, where English is the majority language, the Yankees have infected our media, and spread their culture like a virus.

We watch CNN or Fox News rather than the CBC or CTV. We read The Washington Post and The New York Times rather than The Toronto Star or The Globe and Mail.

Jon Stewart of The Daily Show brings Mark Carney to the studio to personally endorse him for the Liberal leadership; Bill Maher praises Chrystia Freeland, and she expresses her gratefulness and asks to appear on his podcast.

And the Canadian news monopoly Postmedia is quietly owned by American conglomerate Chatham Asset Management, which has been reported by Fortune magazine to have close ties to Donald Trump.

We ignore a plethora of Canadian shows and films and music, because we would rather consume American content that was also produced in Toronto and Vancouver.

We have adopted a posture of learned helplessness, pretending that we cannot compete in the exact same industries where America has already outsourced their production to us.

Are we really this feckless? Québec is home to 8.5 million Canadians, just under a quarter of our total population. And yet it is clear their culture, their society, is vibrant and distinct.

By speaking a separate language from the rest of North America, Québec possesses a strong bulwark against the cultural chauvinism of the Yankee. It has never been our size that has led to America’s cultural invasion; it has been our language.

So, if English itself has become the weakness, if it has become a vector for Yankees to spread propaganda and build a fifth column of traitors that will undermine our federation, then we have a clear solution:

We must embark on a massive Francization campaign, to increase the prominence of the French language in the daily life of the Canadian people, from conversation to culture to labour.

At both the Federal level and the Provincial and Territorial levels, Canada must spend whatever it takes, even if it significantly increases government debt, to ensure that every Canadian adult and child has the ability to gain full fluency in French.

We must provide financial incentives for businesses to operate in French, which is a growing lingua franca across Europe and Africa. We must also provide dedicated subsidies and grants to artistic works that promote languages other than English.

I phrase that last sentence as “other than English” rather than French very intentionally, because the languages of immigrants and Indigenous nations must also be respected.

Canada has always had a multilingual character; both Allophones and Francophones have a mutual interest in preserving our culture against Yankee chauvinism, and indeed we must repair our own acts of cultural chauvinism.

Canada sought to obliterate the culture of the Indigenous peoples whose land we stole. The damage we did constituted a cultural genocide, and we have refused to provide more than token assistance to those seeking to embrace, preserve, and promote their heritage.

There is a necessity in knowing a commonly spoken international language for the benefits of trade. There is also, however, a necessity in preserving minority languages that represent the heritage of many Canadian citizens. We can and must provide the funding for both.

Language is a means of communication, and an expression of culture, but both of those things mean that language is also political. Even the choice of which language to speak is a political act, and sometimes a revolutionary one.

We saw how Russia used Russian-language speakers in Ukraine as an excuse to invade and colonize; I fear that America may well use the same excuse, claiming that English makes us theirs by right.

There is no world in which the English language will be erased from Canada…and I would never want to do so. The heavy-handedness of Québécois language laws is distasteful to me, bordering on the oppressive.

But I believe there must be a middle ground. Ironically, while my family is from Québec, we are Anglophones; I grew up in Ontario where French education was resoundingly terrible.

And yet, as an adult, I work every single day to improve my French, because it’s important to me. I visit Québec every other month, with the goal that I will be more fluent than I was on the last visit.

I will probably never have the full command of the French language that I would if I had been immersed as a child. But this is why I want to massively increase French education in our schools; I want the next generation to grow up smarter and more capable than we are.

Surely, surely, we can make an effort to embrace and promote French as a language of business, of art, and of conversation. We can use language policy to shape and guide Canadian culture, and take long-term steps to increase French proficiency for both adults and children.

On peut parler en français, partout au pays. C'est une langue facile à apprendre. Donc, quand veut-on commencer?