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Partly, Quebec’s various angsts are entirely understandable. A francophone province of eight million people is an unlikely thing to find on a continent of almost 400 million anglophones. It makes sense people would be protective, and maybe a bit paranoid. But paranoia is still paranoia: there is no meaningful movement against official bilingualism in Ottawa, and no meaningful threat to French’s future in Quebec.

This mother tongue malarkey is simply disreputable

Partly, Quebec’s linguistic politics is a self-defeating madness: unilingualism is not a good quality for someone in Quebec to have, on account of the aforementioned 400 million anglophones, and yet the very idea of bilingualism is still viewed with suspicion by many language hawks.

(I met a Dutchman on holiday last month who was utterly flummoxed by Quebec. One of the great advantages of being Dutch, he said, was the necessity of growing up — and arriving at adulthood — multilingual. The 2016 census data show the number of Quebecers who say they can only conduct a conversation in French dropped below 50 per cent between 2011 and 2016. In an alternate Canadian universe, that would be a good news headline.)

And partly, let’s face it, we’re just talking about garden-variety nativism dressed up for Sunday dinner.

“Language is like a tree,” Lisée told reporters. “Speaking French as a second language is like all the leaves on the tree, but the roots of the community, of a language, are people who do live primarily in this language and culture.”

Well, that’s quite a conundrum. Immigration can help on the language front, but Quebecers are quite suspicious about the folkways those immigrants bring with them — especially when they involve headgear. If they won’t fall in line, and since Quebecers aren’t having babies at nearly a sufficient clip to keep their, uh, culture tree growing, I don’t know what else to suggest.

Paranoid nativism is certainly an option to keep the troops entertained, so to speak. It always has been. But it’s not a good look.

• Email: cselley@nationalpost.com | Twitter: cselley