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“The children of Bill 101” have got the message.

Those are the first- and second-generation immigrants required to attend French school by Bill 101, the Quebec language law adopted 40 years ago Saturday.

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In a documentary shown Thursday on Radio-Canada’s news channel, ICI RDI, some of them said that, even though they speak French fluently, and even if they have lived in this province all their lives, they don’t feel Québécois.

That’s because they’re often reminded that they aren’t.

Cathy Wong, who is of Chinese-Vietnamese descent, said that although she speaks French (and writes it well enough to have a column in Le Devoir), knows Quebec’s history and has Québécois friends, people still speak to her “as if I were a foreigner and still personify a form of threat.”

Bill 101 has probably gone as far as practically possible toward making French the “common language” of Quebec; the corrected 2016 census data recently released by Statistics Canada indicate that the proportion of Quebecers who report that they can speak French has stabilized at more than 94 per cent.