“…The ‘de facto’ rule that any person seeking the leadership of a Canadian political party — and thus the prime ministership — must be fluent in English and French is proving a particularly visible glass ceiling… Some rare but useful public pushback on the role of bilingualism in Canadian politics has been the result.
“The conservative publisher Ken Whyte wrote a masterful and much-shared essay in the ‘Globe and Mail’ {See below}…coolly debunking the conventional wisdom that speaking French provides an invaluable electoral edge to any would-be prime minister. What actually matters, Whyte noted, is whether the candidate is from Quebec.
“The French-speaking province “isn’t attracted to bilingual leaders from outside Quebec”, he wrote — what Quebeckers want is a “favorite son” {They want to run the country!}. Citing a half-century of precedent, Whyte identified two paths to winning Parliament: a Quebecker party leader who loses western Canada but wins Quebec and Ontario, or a non-Quebecker who loses Quebec but wins everywhere else.
“The record of Quebeckers in the West is at least as dismal as the record of non-Quebeckers in Quebec”,
he concluded, so the two strategies are mutually exclusive.
“A representative of Canadian officialdom clearly had to respond to such heresy. It eventually came in the form of a limp rebuttal by Graham Fraser, the federal government’s former official languages czar.
“Fraser fancies himself a persuasive bilingualism advocate… Fraser’s case for official bilingualism has always been imperious and orthodox, alas, and his rebuttal to Whyte provides a good illustration of the widening intellectual gap between Canadian bilingualism’s critics and defenders.
“Fraser arbitrarily dismissed Whyte’s observation that two modern Prime Ministers, John Diefenbaker and Stephen Harper, won power without Quebec on the grounds that these victories “did not last longer than one term”. He implied fluency in French is entirely a product of “time and energy” — as opposed to, say, growing up in a bilingual community. He applauded bilingual journalists who subject politicians to “a merciless series of evaluations” when their French skills appear lacking.
“Curiously, however, Fraser also framed bilingualism as a form of “political leadership” — specifically, leadership to those
“four million French-speaking Canadians who speak no English”.
“There is an elephant in the room when people such as Fraser make appeals such as these. Bilingualism’s boosters take it for granted that it is necessary and proper for Canada’s majority to know a minority community’s language in order for that minority to enjoy full inclusion in Canadian society — but only if that minority speaks French. Indeed, Fraser darkly cited a supposedly-infamous moment from the 1980s, when unilingual Tory leadership candidate John Crosbie defensively “snapped at reporters that he didn’t speak Chinese, either”.
“For Canada’s non-French-speaking minorities — including Chinese Canadians — conforming to the linguistic norms of the majority is not a particularly controversial expectation. It’s just taken for granted, for instance, that immigrants to cities such as Toronto and Vancouver will learn English if they want to thrive. Quebec’s own government certainly assumes minority language communities are obliged to assimilate into its French-speaking majority; the province explicitly seeks French-speaking immigrants and enforces strict policies to discourage the public use of non-French languages.
“The idea that French-speaking minorities should be a different case — that the majority should accommodate them — can be justified only through a blunt appeal to law. Canada is an “officially bilingual country”, Fraser reminded. Outside Quebec, French-speakers certainly aren’t numerous enough to make a national regime of French-English bilingualism self-evidently rational on utilitarian, or even compassionate, grounds. The policy exists simply to protect Canada’s French-Canadian minority — chiefly but not exclusively in Quebec — from experiencing the natural pressures Canada’s other linguistic minorities experience as residents of an English-majority country.
“To some, that’s fine. Quebeckers cite an increasingly-distant past in which a lack of public accommodation for the French language was a proxy for a cruel ethnic power struggle at their expense. Modern Canada is a vastly more diverse society, however, and diversity has divorced the English language from its history as a tribal weapon. Today, English is spoken by Canadians of all backgrounds simply because it’s an efficient tool for communicating with the largest number of people.
“It’s considered toxic to say, but Quebec should feel pressured by all this — not to abandon French but to adopt the disposition of European nations such as Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands, in which widespread fluency with English as a second language is seen as a national strength, not an existential danger…”
–‘Canada’s French-English bilingualism is bad policy — and worse politics’,
J.J. McCullough, Washington Post, Jan. 24, 2020
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/01/24/canadas-french-english-bilingualism-is-bad-policy-worse-politics/
Feature IMAGE: ILLUSTRATION BY BRYAN GEE
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
“How did the federal political leadership pool get this shallow and predictable? The destructive role played by a fetish for French-English bilingualism can’t be understated.
“Though not technically mandatory, the convention that any leader of a Canadian political party must be “fluently bilingual” is now heretical to question. Former Premier Brad Wall of Saskatchewan, for instance, a competent, popular conservative politician who would be considered a logical would-be Prime Minister in any genuinely meritocratic democracy, is said to have taken himself out of the running following the realization that it would be impossible to pick up French at his age.
“For the past 50 years, Canada’s rate of French-English bilingualism has failed to climb out of the teens, with the current underwhelming rate of 17.9% — a 5.7% improvement since 1961 — nevertheless celebrated as the “highest proportion ever”.
“The vast majority of bilinguals live in Quebec…
“Speaking fluent French correlates with no useful skill one might expect a Prime Minister to have. Contrary to conventional mythology, it doesn’t even correlate with improved electability in vote-rich Quebec. No Right-of-center Canadian political party has won more than a dozen seats in Quebec in 30 years, despite an abundance of French-speaking party leaders. At best, insisting on a “fluently bilingual” party head merely imposes an extraordinary handicap on the parties’ ability to broaden their leadership bench beyond a small clique of federal politicians who have successfully contorted to Ottawa’s weird expectations…
“Canada sits alone among major Western democracies in just how many illiberal structural barriers it has erected to ensure its political leadership conforms to certain ideological expectations…”
–‘Don’t expect change from Canada’s next Conservative leader’,
J.J. McCullough, Washington Post, Dec. 19, 2019
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/12/19/dont-expect-change-canadas-next-conservative-leader/
“It’s time the {‘Conservative’} party reconsidered its bilingual prerequisite, along with its approach to winning seats in Quebec. It hasn’t worked. Bilingualism is not a constitutional or legislative requirement for a party leader or Prime Minister. It is not even a ‘convention’.
“Bilingualism as a leadership credential arose relatively recently in our history in response to…the rise of separatist sentiment in Quebec. The retiring ‘Liberal’ {Party} Prime Minister, Lester B. Pearson, thought it advisable, under the circumstances, that his successor be a bilingual French-Canadian capable of countering the appeal of René Lévesque.
“Mr. Pearson was not bilingual. Nor were five of his seven predecessors as ‘Liberal’ {Party} leader. Nor was his ‘Progressive Conservative’ counterpart, former Prime Minister John Diefenbaker, whose party through history had seemed almost to demand unilingual leadership. While in 24 Sussex, Mr. Pearson and Mr. Diefenbaker both followed the time-honoured strategy of managing political affairs in Quebec by appointing a francophone lieutenant. The lieutenant advised the leader and spoke for the party in the province, an approach elevated to high art over two decades by Mackenzie King, the long-serving unilingual anglophone prime minister, and his talented ‘Liberal’ {Party} associate Ernest Lapointe.
“It made sense for Pearson’s ‘Liberals’, dependent for their electoral success on a huge whack of Quebec seats, to prioritize language, although, importantly, Mr. Pearson’s specific concern was not bilingual leadership but Quebecois leadership. And given the new threat to national unity, it also made sense for ‘Progressive Conservatives’ to heed Quebec’s concerns and aspirations.
“Mr. Diefenbaker’s successor as PC leader was Robert Stanfield, who, while unilingual, supported incoming ‘Liberal’ {Party} Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s bilingualism policies, most notably the ‘Official Languages Act’, which gave French and English equal status in the government of Canada.
“The lesson taken by ‘Progressive Conservatives’ from Mr. Stanfield’s three successive defeats at the hands of Mr. Trudeau was that bilingualism was a leadership imperative. Anglo Bob managed just nine Quebec seats in three elections. Each of his successors – whether leading the ‘Progressive Conservatives’, the Canadian Alliance, or the ‘Conservative’ Party of Canada – has been functionally bilingual (Reform leader Preston Manning was not).
“Yet with the exception of a Quebecker, Brian Mulroney, who won 58 and 63 Quebec seats in the 1984 and 1988 elections (more on him in a moment), none of Anglo Bob’s bilingual successors improved much on his record.
“The bilingual Albertan, Joe Clark, won three Quebec seats in two federal elections (1979 and 1980). The bilingual British Columbian Kim Campbell took one in 1993. The fluently-bilingual Jean Charest and a rehabilitated Joe Clark, leading the rump of the PC party in 1997 and 2000 respectively, earned six seats between them.
“Mr. Manning’s ‘Reform’ did not win a Quebec seat in 1993 or 1997. The Canadian Alliance’s Stockwell Day, a bilingual Albertan, matched that record with no Quebec seats in 2000.
“After merging the ‘Progressive Conservatives’ and the ‘Reform/Alliance’ movement {Actually, it was a takeover by the old ‘Progressive Conservatives’} into the ‘new’ ‘Conservative’ Party of Canada, the bilingual Albertan/Ontarian Mr. Harper averaged seven seats in Quebec over five elections. Andrew Scheer, a bilingual Saskatchewanian, succeeded Mr. Harper and won 10 in Quebec…
“Election after election, ‘Conservatives’ choose bilingual leaders with an eye to cracking the Quebec electorate. Election after election, they fail. In 15 attempts since the end of the Diefenbaker/Pearson era, bilingual non-Quebeckers leading the ‘Conservative’, ‘Progressive Conservative’, or the Canadian Alliance parties have won 66 seats in Quebec, an average 4.4 a party per outing.
“They fail because Quebec isn’t attracted to bilingual leaders from outside Quebec. In every election since the retirement of Mr. Pearson, Quebec has given the vast majority of its seats to a Quebecker. What Quebec wants is what the Americans call a favourite son (presumably a favourite daughter would do, as well): one of their own, a Brian Mulroney, a Gilles Duceppe, a Jack Layton.
{Their practice of tribal politics undermines modern democracy which is based on individual voters, not tribal groupings. See link below…}
“Having a favourite son as leader is no guarantee of success in Quebec, as Tom Mulcair and Gilles Duceppe learned on getting clocked by another favourite son, Justin Trudeau, in 2015. But running a bilingual non-Quebecker in the province is a sure route to failure for any party. It doesn’t even work for ‘Liberals’, as John Turner, Paul Martin and Michael Ignatieff have learned. Each was soundly beaten by a favourite son.
“Mr. Mulroney is the exception who proves the rule for ‘Conservatives’. He won his leadership by promising the PCs a long-sought triumph in Quebec and, as a favourite son (the only one to ever lead the PC party at strength), he delivered. He imposed what was essentially a ‘Liberal’ {Party} strategy on the ‘Conservative’ party, operated a Quebecentric government, and blew the PCs to smithereens. The party’s western base fell into the hands of Mr. Manning and the PCs soon ceased to exist.
“The fundamental difference between the ‘Liberal’ {Party} and Conservative {Party} traditions in Canada is that one needs Quebec, the other needs the West.
“Just as no non-Quebec anglophone has made a substantial dent in Quebec since Mr. Pearson, no Quebecker apart from Mr. Mulroney has won the west in a federal election. Indeed, it’s worse than that: Only twice in modern times has a Quebec leader other than Mr. Mulroney won a single western province in a federal election. Pierre Trudeau won most of B.C. in 1968 and Jean Chrétien most of Manitoba in 1993.
“The record of Quebeckers in the west is at least as dismal as the record of non-Quebeckers in Quebec, and it is no coincidence that the three largest spasms of western alienation occurred with Quebeckers leading the federal government: Pierre Trudeau, Brian Mulroney and Justin Trudeau (and things weren’t much better under Mr. Chrétien).
“It’s time ‘Conservatives’ recognize the reality of their party, scrap the notion of winning Quebec with bilingual leaders, and concentrate on finding leaders who will win the most seats in Ontario, the West, and Atlantic Canada. The ‘C’PC needs to judge leaders on their appeal, knowledge, intelligence, policies, experience, demonstrable competence, character, work ethic, etc. If the best available person also happens to be bilingual and capable of picking up four seats in Quebec, fine, but that’s irrelevant so far as electoral success is concerned.
“‘Liberals’ will argue that a prime minister of Canada needs to speak to Canadian francophones in their native tongue. It’s smart of ‘Liberals’ to press that view. It makes the ‘Conservatives’ (if they listen) less effective, and it makes a virtue of the fact that ‘Liberals’, hugely dependent on Quebec, have more limited leadership options than ‘Conservatives’. For 50 years, ‘Liberals’ have been unable to hold government without a Quebec leader.
“Accepting the reality of the ‘C’PC’s situation, something easier today with the separatist threat in abeyance, opens the party to a world of new leadership possibilities. Just 18% of Canadians are conversant in both French and English. The party would no longer be dismissing out of hand 83% of Canada’s political talent (and 90% of non-Quebeckers) to no electoral advantage whatsoever. It could also stop watering its message on such important issues as religious freedom, supply management and ‘SNC-Lavalin’ in order to chase Quebec pipe dreams.
“Mr. Harper demonstrated that ‘Conservatives’ can win comfortable majorities without strength in Quebec and this gets easier over time. Since the 1960s, Quebec’s share of Canada’s population has declined to 23% from 29%; its share of parliamentary seats has declined correspondingly. French-speaking Quebecois have shrunk to 18% from 24% of Canada’s population. Statistics Canada sees these trends continuing, if not accelerating, long into the future.
“Not only will Quebec be a smaller piece of Canada; it will be less like the Quebec of the past 50 years, with more ethnocultural diversity and a relatively smaller economy. Meanwhile, the West has been growing, its share of parliamentary seats has been increasing, and these trends are likely to continue.
“In round numbers, the West’s population is 11 million (Quebec is eight million). In low-growth population projections by ‘StatsCan’, the west will have 13.5 million people by 2038 (Quebec 8.7 million). The more Canada grows, the bigger the gap becomes. In ‘Statscan’s high-growth scenarios, the West will have 16.7 million people by 2038, Quebec 10 million. We could be only five elections from these scenarios.
“Any competent government will aspire to govern well in all corners of the country. The ‘Conservative’ Party’s best option for governing well in Quebec is to resurrect the idea of a Quebec lieutenant, a capable favourite son or daughter trusted by Quebeckers and well-entrenched in either the province’s federal or provincial politics. It is a less fraudulent approach than pretending that a Stockwell Day or a Joe Clark can “speak the language” of Quebeckers. Technically, perhaps, they can. But so far as Quebeckers are concerned, they don’t, they can’t, they never will.
“Canada is too large and diverse a country for one personality to resonate throughout its whole. Mr. Trudeau is learning this now, leaning on a native Albertan, Chrystia Freeland, as his western lieutenant {She’s hated in the West! No one even knows that she’s from Alberta}. There is no shame in this. Canada has been always been too much for one person.
“Recognizing Canada’s diversity and sharing power with regional lieutenants (and regional caucuses) would also be a welcome means of decentralizing the overwhelming power of the Prime Minister’s Office in Canadian politics. It would re-establish the principle that it takes a government, rather than one individual, to lead the country. Everyone wins.”
{And which Prime Minister is going to voluntarily give up that power???}
–‘Conservatives think the party’s next leader should be bilingual. They are wrong’,
KENNETH WHYTE, Toronto GLOBE AND MAIL, JANUARY 17, 2020
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-do-you-need-to-be-bilingual-to-be-pm-pas-du-tout/
See also:
‘DEMOCRACY AND TRIBALISM’ {June 20, 2015}:
“The history of progress in the world is the history of ‘detribalisation’, and the race or ethnic politics that goes with tribalised societies.”
https://endracebasedlaw.wordpress.com/2015/06/20/democracy-and-tribalism/
“Canada is a nation of people too eager to keep quiet. We brood about things that annoy and enrage us, rather than admit them openly; we chat around the dinner table about worries we don’t have the courage to bring up in public. We politely claim to not be bothered by things that really annoy us, and we give our politicians a pass on ignoring issues we desperately want addressed.
“It all adds up to a culture that too often appears to offer settled consensus on debates that aren’t remotely settled at all.
“Bilingualism is one of them.
“In the aftermath of the publication of my most recent editorial – ”Let Them Learn French”: Canada’s Bilingual Elite Hold All the Power“ – I’ve been widely denounced by all manner of pundit, much of Quebec, and even our old pal Gilles Duceppe. Bigoted, ignorant, and insensitive seem to be the adjectives of choice for my central argument – that there’s something fundamentally discriminatory and anti-democratic about reserving all of the best government jobs for the 17% of the Canadian population who happen to be fluent in French and English.
“On the other hand, I’ve also heard from numerous Canadians applauding me for finally confronting one of this country’s most sacred taboos head-on. Many were frustrated Anglos working for the federal government in Ottawa or elsewhere, folks who have grown painfully cynical about the state of the Canadian public sector after repeatedly witnessing untalented co-workers receive promotions simply for possessing arbitrary skills in a second language utterly irrelevant to competence in the job itself.
“I’ve been ‘screened out’ from jobs I’m overqualified for and don’t even bother applying to many postings because they require French”,
said one reader.“Canada is segregating away its best human capital on a non-meritocratic basis”,
said another.
“Others told stories of entering the federal service with honest intentions of “becoming bilingual“, only to find the process far more onerous than expected. They spoke with the dejected apathy that comes with trying your best and still failing.
“I don’t regret a word I wrote in Monday’s column. The negative response it’s generated from Quebeckers in particular has merely highlighted the fact that Canada is still very much a nation of “two solitudes“, with French Canada possessing a very particular (sheltered, frankly) understanding of language born from the uniqueness of Quebec society, with sweeping generalizations from this unrepresentative experience used to justify imposing preposterous bilingual standards on the rest of the country.
“By far, the most common refrain from my Quebec critics was, ironically, the very sentiment I decried in the article’s headline: “Let them Learn French!” In other words, to even complain about the “burden” of bilingualism is to declare oneself lazy and stupid {Then 60% of Quebec is also “lazy and stupid”}, and to compare Canada’s bilingual population, as I did, to some privileged caste in a third world oligarchy, is appallingly small-minded. Anyone can learn French, they declared; just open a textbook and get cracking!
{Anyone can learn ENGLISH — “just open a textbook and get cracking!”}
“It’s a wonderful sentiment in theory, it just happens to contradict everything we know about linguistic science.
“The excellent linguistics blogger Mark Rosenfelder posted a tremendously-useful essay some time ago summarizing much of the modern scientific consensus regarding how languages are learned – or not learned. In short, he concluded, learning a new language takes “immense effort“, meaning “people will only learn them if it’s socially or economically inescapable“.
“This is why children seem to learn languages so easily – not because their brains are somehow more pliable, but simply because they exist in a state in which the need to learn a language quickly and comprehensively is most pressing. The same principle explains why children of bilingual immigrants often reply in English when mom asks a question in her native tongue, or why you’ll find the heaviest accents among residents of an inner-city ethnic ghetto. People generally only become fluent in languages it makes sense for them to learn in the circumstances in which they live, with this “need“, as Rosenfelder puts it, “interpreted from the learner’s perspective, not the observer’s“.
“This question of “need” is what demolishes the arguments of Mr. Duceppe and other sour Quebeckers who complain that since they, as French Canadians, learned English, it’s only fair for Anglos to learn French, too. Fairness might be a nice principle, but when it comes to language, it won’t get you far. A fiery separatist like Duceppe, after all, surely wasn’t motivated to learn the language of his oppressors simply out of some sympathetic sense of social justice.
“Quebeckers learn English for the same reason Swedes or Luxembourgers learn some other language: when you float as a tiny linguistic outpost in a vast sea of something else — in Quebec’s case, a province of eight million French speakers surrounded on all sides by a massive continent of over 300 million Anglos — it makes all the sense in the world to adapt.
“Quebeckers need to learn English because it’s a practical skill for effective communication and commerce…not just with the citizens of neighbouring states and provinces, but with a wider world in which English has emerged the ‘lingua franca’ of business, diplomacy, and technology.
“A Calgarian who lives two thousand miles from the closest French neighbourhood experiences no comparable pressure. He can crack a book, listen to tapes, or even take expensive night courses, but everything we know about language suggests that without a constant need to speak French in day-to-day life, he’ll probably never become fluent in any genuine way — certainly not to the standard Ottawa wants.
“This is why federal bilingualism requirements for the country’s top bureaucratic or political jobs (or even, as many readers reminded me, an increasing lot of mid-level or entry-level jobs – ”40% of positions in the federal public service“, by the government’s own estimate) are, in fact, fundamentally elitist at core. So long as Ottawa’s hiring practices prioritize a talent only a small geographic subset of the population will ever organically develop, bilingualism will always be little more than a backdoor affirmative action plan to concentrate power in the hands of those inhabiting the bicultural fusion cities of Ottawa and Montreal — even as Canada’s economic centre shifts steadily westward.
“Continued in its present form, official bilingualism represents an ongoing threat to Canadian democracy, egalitarianism, and meritocracy, while entrenching tremendously-regressive values in their place.
“It’s certainly a crisis worth discussing.”
–‘Bilingualism Is a Threat to Canadian Democracy’,
J.J. McCullough, Huffington Post, 03/20/2014, Updated 05/20/2014
https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/jj-mccullough/bilingualism-democracy_b_4997871.html
‘As True As Ever’… From 2002:
“Canada is not, and never will be, a bilingual country.
“We have two official languages but French is only spoken by the majority of residents in one tiny region — southern Quebec and a portion of New Brunswick…
“The facts are that federal bilingualism was agreed to some 30 years ago by anglophone Canadians only to appease Quebec. And despite billions spent promoting French, it simply has not taken root anywhere except Quebec, New Brunswick and Ottawa.
“In Quebec, its usage has increased only because of that province’s draconian language laws that force francophone and immigrant children to attend French language schools, and also because of the exodus during the 1970s of 400,000 anglophones after the discriminatory laws were passed.
“Today across Canada, more people speak Cantonese, Italian, Hindi, Portuguese or Ukrainian than speak French…
“The irreversible facts are that history has rendered Canada an anglophone country — first as a British colony with British institutions and traditions such as parliament and the monarchy, and latterly as the principal economic partner and neighbour of the anglophone United States.
“Besides that, special status for one linguistic group based on some ancient, perceived injustice is simply not going to wash here. Canada has become a pluralistic society, where ethnic groups mix freely and peacefully and no single group is singled out for official privileges {Aboriginals?}. Quebec is the exception and is not a pluralistic society.
“…”Bilingualism” wherever practiced has not bilingualized the population but merely translated into an unfair and costly affirmative action program for francophones at the expense of anglophones, as well as of efficiencies in government.
“For instance, anglo rights activists at ‘Alliance Quebec’ have undertaken some important studies into the overrepresentation of francophones in the federal and Quebec governments. It is shocking.
“By earmarking a job as bilingual in the federal system, for instance, francophones are more likely to be hired because a greater proportion of francophones are bilingual than anglophones speak French. That’s because they have an incentive to learn English — the language is absolutely necessary in order for them to succeed or go anywhere in Canada or the United States. Anglophones, on the other hand, don’t have to master French in order to succeed anywhere in North America, except in the federal, Quebec or New Brunswick civil services.
“That’s why Ottawa’s bilingualism policy has been unfair from the start. There should have been a quota for francophones, based on population.
“Without quotas, language testing and French proficiency standards have proven to be ways to get jobs-for-the-boys-and-girls. Over the years, diplomats, assistant deputy ministers, soldiers, low-level managers and even broom pushers in the federal system have found their careers impeded or ended at great cost to taxpayers.
“In some federal departments in Ottawa, at least 75% of the staff are francophones — with the management ranks up to 90%. At most, francophones should account for no more than their proportional share of the population, or less than 20%.
“All of this has damaged the country because it has contributed to the inordinate preoccupation with, and favouritism toward, Quebec affairs, businesses and problems at the expense of the rest of the country, mostly western Canada.
“In practice, official bilingualism has done the opposite and led to unilingualism. This is most evident in Quebec, where the provincial government openly and illegally discriminates against anglophones when it comes to doling out government jobs or doing business in the private sector.
“It has even occurred in officially “bilingual” New Brunswick, according to a reader.
“In the province you would find that all top level positions, and particularly key positions, are filled by French speakers. They then have the right to determine who gets jobs, government contracts, advancement, etc. This has just been extended to municipal governments”,
wrote a francophone, asking to remain anonymous…”
–‘Bilingualism’s sorry legacy’,
Diane Francis, Financial Post, August 08, 2002
http://www.imperatif-francais.org/articles-imperatif-francais/articles-2002/le-canada-pays-unilingue-anglais-2/
See also:
‘Fake ‘Conservatives’ Support Language Bigotry’ (Quebec/Bill 101) {Dec.1, 2020}:
Right wing of the ‘Liberal’ Party betrays English-speaking Canadians yet again:
“‘Conservative’ {Party} Leader Erin O’Toole has joined the Bloc Québécois and the New ‘Democratic’ Party in supporting Bill 101 rules for the {forced} use of the French language for federally chartered businesses and activities operating in Quebec… O’Toole spoke only in French during the debate… Aside from O’Toole, all the ‘Conservative’ {Party} speakers during the four-hour debate were Quebec MPs, in an apparent bid to woo voters in the province…”
https://canadiansforlegalequalityblog.wordpress.com/2020/12/01/fake-conservatives-support-language-bigotry/
‘Federal Parties Support French-Language Bigotry’ (Bill 101) {Feb.15, 2021}:
“Prime Minister Justin Trudeau…suggested that Ottawa is considering giving French some extra legal protection within Quebec.
“For Canada to remain a bilingual country, Quebec has to be first and foremost a francophone province”, {Why?}
he told reporters, in French… Among other reasons, “that is why we are looking at the ‘modernization’ of the Official Languages Act”, he said.
{It’s impossible to ‘modernize it except by its abolition…}
“This review is due and there will be measures to protect French everywhere, including in Quebec.”
https://canadiansforlegalequality.wordpress.com/2021/02/15/federal-parties-support-french-language-bigotry/
‘Danger: Bigots At Work!’ (Quebec Language Discrimination) {Dec.11, 2019}:
More blatant language discrimination from French bigots – and our Constitution enables this!:
“A new language policy will ensure all ministries and organizations offer public services almost exclusively in French.”
https://canadiansforlegalequality.wordpress.com/2019/12/11/danger-bigots-at-work/
Canadians For Legal Equality 