La métropole contre la nation? La politique montréalaise d’intégration des personnes immigrantes by David Carpentier (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: La métropole contre la nation? La politique montréalaise d’intégration des personnes immigrantes by David Carpentier Gavin Furrey Carpentier, David. La métropole contre la nation? La politique montréalaise d’intégration des personnes immigrantes. PUQ, 2022. ISBN 978-2-7605-5778-9. Pp. 232. The question broached by this work is intriguing not only for those studying minority nations, municipal public policy, and multilingual and multicultural contexts, but will also speak to the average citizen familiar with the mixed messages about belonging and civic and economic participation as they are experienced in Montreal. As Carpentier writes, “Espace emblématique de la reconquête de la majorité francophone sur sa destinée collective, Montréal constitue un véritable baromètre identitaire donnant souvent la mesure à l’ensemble de la province” (183). Hence, the disconnect between the province’s discourse and normative orientations regarding the integration of new immigrants, versus those of Montreal, merit inspection. Although this study focuses primarily on the period from 2006 to 2019, Carpentier traces the origins of a distinct approach by the city towards the integration of new immigrants back to the 1980s, when the ethnocultural composition of the metropole took on substantial transformations (84-85). With a growing immigrant population, and a diversification of this population, the city faced needs around the themes of economic integration and fighting racism and discrimination; simultaneously, the nationalist movement of Quebec, which favored a discourse of a growing francophone, white, middle class, contributed to a national framing of immigration as problematic to the affirmation of Quebec as a society distinct within anglophone North America. Carpentier delineates the tensions between theories of multiculturalism and interculturalism, and asserts that, “[l]a Ville de Montréal adhère officiellement, à tout le moins sur le plan discursif dans ses documents publics, à une acception interactionniste plutôt qu’intégrative de l’interculturalisme” (84). This inter actionist dimension to a theory of interculturalism highlights the value that the city places upon ethnocultural diversity, but it can also be interpreted as edulco rating the theory’s assimilationist posture inherent in the emphasis placed on a common language in need of institutional protections. Carpentier examines this tension from a postcolonial theorization that, while addressing on-going discrimi nation, ignores decolonial possibilities. Although this work offers insight into the dynamics of the subsystem of municipal politics by means of interviews with municipal government employees, a critique might be made of the lip service Carpentier pays to theories of decolonization and the absence of literature on decolonizing and indigenizing spaces in Montreal that could inform propositions for building partnerships of governance to create new integrative policies and practices for new-comers. Carpentier addresses certain possibilities already in motion with evidence of discrepancies between Montreal’s official recognition of systemic racism and Legault’s government’s resistance of the term (164-65). However, his [End Page 219] suggestion that Quebec adopt a policy of interculturalism to offer more “Coherence” to municipalities in the area of integration, would likely risk more “coherence” in areas that make Montreal more welcoming to its denizens. Additionally, the suggestion of creating spaces of coordination between municipal and provincial governments as equal partners in integrating new-comers repeats a colonial bias ignoring Indigenous groups who might also wish to be partners in welcoming and integrating new-comers to the territory. [End Page 220] Gavin Furrey Independent Scholar Copyright © 2023 American Association of Teachers of French