After instructing Quebec's new history course for a year, teachers say it must be substantially changed.

Parents and teachers have launched a petition calling for the Liberal government to create a course that presents Quebec history fairly and acknowledges that non-francophones have made positive contributions to society.

The chairperson of the Committee for the Enhancement of the History Curriculum in Quebec is Robert Green, a history teacher at Westmount High School.

He said the problems that many people had with the course, namely its near-exclusion of non-francophones in the province, are not acceptable.

"By rendering minority groups invisible, by presenting anglophones in the role of comic-book villain, it's sending the message to students that they're not members of society," said Green.

Green and the committee say the issue must be presented to the public.

"The main thing we're asking for is an extensive process of public consultation and that didn't happen the last time around," said Green. "The consultations that did happen were with school board consultants who were sworn to confidentiality."

The new course was launched under the Parti Quebecois government in 2014 and was supposed to offer an inclusive look at how First Nations peoples, anglophones, allophones, and francophones built Quebec.

Instead the course rarely mentions anglophones except to identify the community as a frequent source of conflict in the province.

Dayo Odubayo, of the English Parents' Committee Association, said ignoring positive contributions of non-francophones could lead to future strife.

"In order to be a responsible citizen you need to be aware of who you live with, where you work, what your relationship is with the province," said Odubayo. "The way you get this done is by making sure that all students in Quebec know about different contributions that different people have made to the province."

The first version of the course, taught at several schools in 2015-16, was revised, but Green said that process was co-opted by a conservative separatist group. As a result, the history course offers a narrow, ideological view that doesn't reflect real society,

"It didn't address any of the fundamental problems that existed in the first draft," said Green.

He said that in the first draft "you didn't find a single positive contribution to society made by an anglophone. In the new version, there's one. They've added that anglophones were sort of involved in the early days of Quebec's feminist movement."

Green said the focus of the course should, of course, be on francophones, and that negative acts of older regimes should be included -- but that they should be balanced with the reality that very few anglophone were business elites, and that Black and Indigenous people were kept as slaves during the French regime.

"Many of the teachers in Quebec's English system are going to do what they always do... and supplement the curriculum in ways that help their students," said Green.

While some teachers in the English Montreal School Board are supplementing the history class with other materials, that shouldn't have to be the case, said board chair Angela Mancini.

“I think it's important that we recognize the history of our people and how we become you know the province that we are today,” she said.

 

“We would like to see and open and public consultation with the various communities who have a stake in this,” said Green.

Quebec Education Minister Sebastien Proulx said groups have already been consulted and their concerns heard and because it's still in the pilot project phase, discussions regarding the content will continue.