Agnès Maltais and Nathalie Normandeau are two elected members of the Quebec National Assembly.

One makes an effort to speak English, even though fewer than 2% of her voters are English-speaking. The other refuses to speak English, despite the presence of a bloc of about 5,000 English-speakers in her riding.

One represents the Parti Québécois. The other is a Quebec Liberal. But if you guessed that the MNA who refuses to speak English is the PQ politician, you would be wrong.

Normandeau, Quebec’s deputy premier and natural resources minister and No. 2 in the Liberal government of Jean Charest, can count on most of the 5,000 English voters in her rural Bonaventure riding to assure her election majorities. But Normandeau does not speak their language.

It is Maltais, the PQ member for Quebec City’s Taschereau riding, who answers the questions of English reporters in their own language.

And she is not alone. PQ leader Pauline Marois has been mocked for the poor quality of her English, but she keeps plugging away at it. In fact, most PQ frontbenchers now speak English. One of them, Véronique Hivon, MNA for Joliette, has a law degree from the London School of Economics.

Normandeau is not the only Liberal who avoids speaking English. Among the Liberal ministers, six speak no English. And other Liberals have difficulty speaking the language of the province’s minority, who overwhelmingly vote Liberal.

Charest is perfectly at ease in both languages. And he has made it clear that defending French is his primary duty. That would seem to be a strategy from the PQ playbook. Yet the PQ complains that Charest does not do enough to advance French. While a half-dozen Charest ministers speak no English, the PQ complains there are businesses in Montreal in which francophones cannot get service in Quebec’s official language, French.

When the PQ government proposed Bill 101, the Charter of the French Language, in 1977, the Liberals fought it hard, calling the proposed legislation intolerant of the English minority and voting against its adoption. Fast-forward to 2010: Charest’s Liberal government is a proud defender of Bill 101.

When Bernard Landry was the PQ premier before Charest, he always talked about Quebec being a “nation.” Once Charest defeated Landry, he made Landry’s policy his own. He even persuaded Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who had hoped to win more seats in Quebec, to have Parliament declare that the “Québécois” are a nation within Canada.

The PQ says, “Oui, mais (yes, but) what does it mean being a nation, when Quebec is not sovereign?” Charest has pushed the envelope on that front as well, negotiating a manpower-mobility agreement with France and persuading Harper to work toward a bilateral economic partnership with the European Union.

Charest makes the point that the PQ goal of sovereignty is no slam dunk, and that Quebec voters are not interested in sovereignty anyway. On the other hand, he says, Quebec, as a Canadian province, has greater autonomy than France does within the European Union. Quebec can also use the clout of Canada, a G7 country, to negotiate its own agreements with Europe.

The PQ’s interest in speaking English is to show they are not narrow nationalists, that they are open to English-speakers across the province and across Canada. The inability of Liberal ministers to speak English and Charest’s ambitious foreign policy show that Quebec can take to the international stage while speaking French — and that the Liberals can be effective Péquistes. IE