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There are several telling contradictions in Premier François Legault’s decision to appeal a court ruling that overturned a ban on the children of asylum seekers attending subsidized daycare in Quebec.

The Quebec Court of Appeal unanimously found the exclusion discriminatory, especially toward women. Although the policy started in 2018 under the Liberal government of Philippe Couillard, Legault said he will fight all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada to bar access because Quebecers should have priority at Centres de la petite enfance.

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“It’s common sense,” he said, citing the perennial shortage of spots.

It was perhaps a not-so-subtle attempt to stoke the resentment of families on waiting lists as Quebec struggles with an unprecedented number of asylum seekers putting pressure on the province’s finances and social services, while the province also seeks more power over immigration.

Four Quebec cabinet ministers teamed up last week to demand $1 billion from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to deal with the cost of providing education, health care and social assistance to 160,000 migrants who have arrived in the past few years.

If Quebec finds it so onerous to provide welfare to asylum seekers, why prevent parents from working by blocking their children from daycare?

Because more than money and the ability to deliver services, Quebec’s concern over the arrival of so many asylum seekers is largely about language, culture and identity.

It didn’t take long for the “humanitarian crisis” the quartet of cabinet ministers were lamenting to become a “threat” to these sensitive matters.

“It could happen if we welcome more people than we are able to house, teach French and integrate into Quebec society,” warned Jean-François Roberge, Quebec’s minister of Canadian relations, after requesting that Ottawa redistribute some of the new arrivals elsewhere in the country. “So, yes, there are things that are threatened, there are services that are threatened, there is a way of life that is threatened if the numbers are too great.”

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After a report by Quebec’s commissioner of the French language, the existential angst has moved into overdrive. Benoît Dubreuil revealed that the number of newcomers who don’t have a working knowledge of French has tripled in just two years while there are six times more temporary foreign workers, international students and asylum seekers in Quebec today than in 2016.

You’d think allowing little asylum seekers to go to daycare — to help integrate them into Quebec society and give their parents time to learn French — would be common sense in this context. Alas, no.

Even more hypocritical, two other categories of Quebec’s 528,000 non-permanent residents, whose lack of French skills were also cited by Dubreuil, are allowed to access CPEs. The children of temporary foreign workers, who care for the elderly or harvest crops, and of international students, whose hefty tuition helps compensate for the chronic underfunding of higher education, can attend, creating a double standard.

It’s a testament to how hooked Quebec is on cheap labour and foreign money, since it only has enough people to cover 78 per cent of the 1.4 million jobs that will need to be filled by 2026.

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None of the opposition parties — not even the Quebec Liberals, who initiated the ban — are pushing to contest the appeals court decision (although some of them don’t mind the idea of “redistributing” willing migrants elsewhere in Canada).

But vulnerable asylum seekers have become convenient scapegoats as the Legault government stumbles and flails.

It is perhaps a predictable reflex for a panicking leader who has long politicized immigration and rarely hesitated to use his dog whistle to divide people when it suits his purposes.

However, Legault is not the only one convinced Quebec’s language, culture and identity are threatened like never before by the arrival of 65,000 asylum seekers in 2023 — mainly via the airport now that Roxham Rd. has been shut down. This is over and above the target of 52,000 Quebec set for immigration through traditional channels, which itself is always a matter of contentious debate.

Writing in Le Journal de Montréal, columnist Mathieu Bock-Côté called the phenomenon “submissive immigration,” while commentator Sophie Durocher compared it to the violinists who continued to play while the Titanic went down.

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Quebec’s French-language commissioner noted that in late 2023, there were between 150,000 and 190,000 non-permanent residents who didn’t speak French, up from 60,000 temporary immigrants in 2016. Dubreuil claims it would cost $13 billion to bring all these people up to an intermediate level of French competency, or about the same amount as building a new tramway to east-end Montreal.

There is some skepticism among immigration experts that as many asylum seekers are staying in Quebec after arriving as the government claims.

Nevertheless, this is the stuff of nightmares for language hawks, who tend to take a sky-is-falling view of the status of French no matter the data. It’s also fresh fodder for a government that has frequently used the decline of the French language and Québécois culture to justify all manner of punitive policies that constrain minority rights — even with little to no robust data to back its claims.

Bill 21, forbidding civil servants in positions of authority from wearing religious garb in the name of state secularism, is an overreaching overreaction to misperceptions. Raising tuition for out-of-province students hurts enrolment at McGill and Concordia universities, harms Montreal’s vitality and undermines the economy, despite no proof these fellow Canadians contribute to anglicizing downtown.

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But things could get nastier still as this surge of uncontrolled arrivals backs Legault into a corner politically.

After abandoning the Parti Québécois, he created the Coalition Avenir Québec to break the old sovereignist-federalist dichotomy and seek greater autonomy within Canada. Legault’s inability to obtain relief or money from Ottawa is making his pragmatic nationalism look futile, as a rising Parti Québécois blasts him.

By ignoring Legault’s polite entreaties for more power over immigration, Trudeau could also help push disenchanted nationalists back to the PQ. Even if only a third of PQ voters want sovereignty, according to polls, Trudeau’s hapless lack of control over border entries risks fuelling calls to make Quebec its own country, a situation he has tried very hard to contain.

The spectre of a desperate Legault being egged on by nationalists who say Quebec language and culture are drowning is perhaps most worrisome of all. In an angry screed in Le Journal where he addressed Legault directly, Richard Martineau asked the premier what he’s going to do now that his “autonomist strategy is going nowhere.”

A rhetorical question, perhaps — but watch out.

ahanes@postmedia.com

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