MONTREAL - The provocative cover story in L’actualité’s April 15 edition is a hot-button issue that people are still talking about more than a week after it appeared. Small wonder: the image on the magazine’s cover of a frog holding a sign saying “Ici, on parle English” seemed deliberately designed to kindle language tensions. The cover’s text suggests that Quebec’s young anglophones not only think that French is in a state of decline in Montreal but are happy about it. “Unilingual English bosses? Get used to it!” is another message it suggests is coming from young anglos.

The magazine said its goal was to foster respectful, open-minded conversation between Quebec’s two main linguistic groups. Its first step toward this wished-for exchange, it explained, was to grasp what anglophones are thinking. Hence it conducted a web-based survey of about 560 anglophones.

Critics of the magazine’s self-described effort to promote dialogue have suggested that L’actualité should have dug deeper into anglophone attitudes, and should have asked francophones the same questions it asked anglophones.

To fill the gaps left by L’actualité’s poll, The Gazette and the Association for Canadian Studies commissioned a new poll. Léger Marketing conducted the survey, also web-based, of 777 francophones, 244 anglophones and 79 allophones. (We caution against making firm conclusions about the opinions of allophones due to their small sample size). The poll was conducted the week of March 26.

In our polling, we tried to make sure that the questions asked were posed in as unbiased a way as possible, unlike the L’actualité-CROP poll. In that survey, there were clear cases of respondents being pushed toward a particular answer. One of L’actualité-CROP’s questions, for instance, asked whether respondents thought that English would become the language of the workplace in Montreal. A surprisingly high number of respondents – 54 per cent – said yes. But here is the statement, shamelessly loaded, that respondents were asked to agree or disagree with: “Given the power of globalization and of the English language, it is only a question of time before most work in Montreal will be done in English.” Of course most people agreed.

In posing the same question, the Gazette-ACS-Léger poll dropped the reference to the “power of globalization and of the English language,” instead simply asking if respondents thought that “eventually the majority of Montrealers will work in English.” Twenty-five per cent of anglophones and 48 per cent of francophones agreed. We’re a long way here from L’actualité’s “finding” that the majority of anglophones believe French is on the wane and they’re glad of it.

In fact, most anglophone responses point in the opposite direction. They feel English is in a state of decline in Quebec, not French.

Many also feel unwelcome and that their contributions are unappreciated. And while a majority of anglophones feel they have mastered French, both polls found that francophones disagree with that perception.

The findings of the Gazette-ACS-Léger poll suggest that anglophones have reached out significantly across linguistic lines. Ninety per cent of them have francophone friends, while only 60 per cent of francophones say they have anglophones as friends. But even so, anglophones, especially the younger generation, feel unliked by their French-speaking fellow Quebecers. Seventy per cent of people aged 18 to 24 believe francophones dislike anglophones.