an extremist"? Was it a) Raymond Villeneuve, leader of the Mouvement de Liberation Nationale du Quebec, lately observed stuffing threatening leaflets in the mailboxes of Westmount residents; b) Reform Party leader Preston Manning, whose election campaign just a year ago moved Bouchard to denounce him in the strongest terms as a racist and an enemy of Quebec; or c) the director of the Office de la Langue Francaise, whose most recent concerns have included the unacceptable use of English on business cards and the unacceptable use of Chinese in Montreal's Chinatown?

No, of course, it was none of those. Bouchard has never had much to say about Villeneuve's campaign of intimidation, still less instructing the police to do anything to stop it. Manning's platform now wins Bouchard's praise as the closest of any federal politician to his own. As for the OLF, the most that any minister in Bouchard's government has ever been able to muster in response to a long list of such inanities is a rueful tut-tut, as if to suggest, "those rascals, what did they get up to this time?" Who was it, then, that could have inspired Bouchard's wrath? Why, William Johnson, the veteran journalist newly elected as the president of the English- rights group Alliance Quebec. And not only Bouchard - in the space of a couple of days, Johnson and his followers have variously been described as hard-line, confrontational, take-no-prisoners, anglo-isolationist, divisive, strident, in-your-face, even rabid. And that's in the English press.

If true, this would be worthy of some concern. No one wants to add unnecessarily to the linguistic tensions in Quebec. If the English-speaking community in Quebec had indeed signalled, by the election of Johnson, a retreat into the anglo laager, it would be the worst imaginable development, not only for the country, but for the anglos themselves.

There's no doubt that Johnson can be abrasive, even prickly. He has an unfortunate tendency to excommunicate those he disagrees with. But as for what he stands for - well, let's look at what he believes. There's no mystery in this: he has been promulgating the same views for years, first in his writings, lately in his campaign for the presidency. First, he promises to oppose any attempt on the part of the province to secede in defiance of the constitution, that is, via a unilateral declaration of independence. In other words, he believes that governments should act within the law. That's some extremism.

Second, he believes that English, one of the official languages of Canada, should also be an official language of Quebec. But that's hardly radical: it's a fact. The Constitution Act of 1867 expressly provides for the right to speak English in the legislature of Quebec, and in its courts. The radical position is that of the government of Quebec, which for the past twenty-five years, since the passage of Bill 22, has maintained the legal fiction that Quebec is a unilingually French province.

Third, he believes in bilingual commercial signs. In place of the present "marked predominance" standard, requiring OLF inspectors to measure whether the French letters are twice as high as the English, he would simply require that both languages be equally visible. This is a threat to public order?

Fourth, Johnson believes that parents should be free, within reason, to educate their children in either official language. This is admittedly a novel idea, but only in Quebec: in every other province, citizens whose first language is that of the official language minority in that province or who were educated in that language in Canada are entitled, under Section 23 of the Charter - the "Canada clause" - to have their children schooled in the same language at public expense, wherever numbers warrant.

Only in Quebec, since Bill 22, is the right to minority-language schooling restricted - as indeed the constitution allows. Section 59 of the 1982 Constitution - the one that was "imposed" on Quebec - provides that the first part of the Canada clause, the one that would open English schools to English-speaking immigrants, only comes into effect in Quebec when the government of Quebec agrees it should. But the clear implication is that one day it will. So Johnson's position is hardly beyond the bounds of acceptable opinion.

(It's worth noting that this would not open the floodgates: Chinese or Hindi- speaking immigrants would still have to enrol their kids in French schools.

Even the Charter imposes some restrictions on pure freedom of choice.)

It is on the strength of these positions that Johnson has been labelled, by a Liberal member of the National Assembly, "an English-speaking Guy Bouthillier." Bouthillier is the leader of the nationalist St. Jean Baptiste Society, last seen in public suggesting that the right to vote should be conditional on passing a French-language test.

I'm pretty sure that counts as extremist, even in Quebec. I'm just not sure how it bears any comparison with Johnson.