French versus English Volume 16

Education Department comes up with a novel approach to raise student success.

Under extreme pressure to reduce the appalling dropout rate in Francophone high schools in Quebec, the education department came up with a novel approach.
Count differently....
Yup, the education department announced that it is changing the formula it uses to calculate this dropout rate, with the resulting benefit of 'reducing' the number of students leaving high school without a diploma, by almost 6%.
One of the effects of this change is that it will no longer be possible to directly compare dropout rates with other provinces, an added bonus. LINK(French)

The  department has also been creative in making sure more high school students pass their final French matriculation exam. It changed the exam and the way the test results are evaluated by teachers last June. One teacher suspected that it was now too easy to pass. Benoît Paquin, a teacher in a Montreal suburban high school in Longueuil gave the test to students who were two grades down from the final year and most passed the test with a 72% average when the new marking criteria was used.
According to the teacher the changes were made to make sure that students who have gone through the "reform" or the new controversial education system are able to be as successful as students who learned under  the 'old' system.
How Clever! LINK(French)

Quebec Citizenship 

Michel Seymour, a philosophy professor at the Université de Montréal. has suggested an interesting solution to the Bill 103 'problem,' offering this pearl...

"Quebec citizenship should be established with French as the official language. To acquire this Quebec citizenship, one must exhibit an ability to speak French." LINK

Quebec citizenship?

'Bilingual' New Brunswick leaders debate in French -ugh!

You don't have to speak French to watch this painful butchering of the French language by the provincial party leaders in a pre-election debate. I have added some subtitles to the satirist 'Infoman's' commentary, who provided some well-deserved sarcasm.

 
Pierre Curzi gets Owned

Attending the legislative hearings in Quebec looking into Bill 103, the law that will replace Bill 104 (the language law overturned by the Supreme Court,) MNA Pierre Curzi, champion of the French language and enemy of Paul McCartney and the Montreal Canadiens, stumbled badly on camera. Obviously unprepared and un-attentive, he tried to challenge a representative from VISION schools, a private French primary and high school system that uses English in most of their courses.
Mr. Curzi seemed strangely lost and hemmed and hawed quite a lot. The pièce de résistance is his last question to the school administrator, asking if graduating from the Vision school offers a student a pathway into a private English high school.
Taken aback, the administrator sarcastically reminds Mr. Curzi that any student can attend an English private high school, any time, it doesn't require any credentials. Ha!
I've added subtitles.

Militant site rejoices in Claude Béchard's Death

I'm usually not a big fan of Richard Martineau, but the columnist exposed a rather nasty link between the radical Réseau de résistance du Québécois and it's website and a thoroughly disgusting comment board  LINK.
In talking about the recent cancer death of a 42 year-old Claude Béchard, a Quebec cabinet minister in the Liberal government who left behind a young family, a reader opined;

Louis Hebert wrote:

"Since when, should one not rejoice when one's enemy disappears,  for me, they can all die, these scavengers.  BRAVO!" Link

Claiming innocence Patrick Bourgouis, head off the quasi violent RRQ wrote back to Martineau that the chat room was unmoderated and was no longer associated with the RRQ.

That may be well and good, except it's not entirely true, according to Mr Martineau, 
The board can be reached via a link  on Mr. Bourgouis' website le Quebecois.

Moncton rejects forced bilingualism

"The City of Moncton will not be adopting a bilingual signage bylaw.

City staff presented a report on bilingual signage at yesterday's council meeting and the recommendation was that a bylaw was not the course of action the majority of Monctonians wanted to see.

"I think concern from businesses very clearly was that they really didn't want to be legislated," Catherine Dallaire, the City of Moncton's general manager of corporate services, said in presenting the report's findings. "Their point of view was a little different though with regard to their support for bilingual signage - they didn't disagree that in most cases bilingual signage was something they would support in the community."  By Cole Hobson, Times & Transcript

Air France in trouble over French

Yesterday, I wrote about Quebec language police forcing a Quebec school board to get rid of its English computer keyboards, an interesting story, based largely on its pettiness.
In France, where they have their own version of Bill 101, the Toubin Law, these same types of issues come up as well, but a recent case is not petty at all, with public safety at issue. LINK (French)

The national French airline has just lost a case in French court over the translation into French of technical documents concerning the operation of some airplanes. The documents in question are produced by the airline manufacturer (probably Boeing) in English only. As you may know English is the language of international air travel and pilots generally must communicate in English when flying internationally. As such, the manufacturer provides documents in English only.
The French court ruled that Air France must translate these documents into French for the benefit of pilots, who according to French law have the right to work in French.
Air France argued unsuccessfully, that it is not their obligation to translate safety documents produced by a third party as it may jeopardize safety and that the issue is moot as all their pilots are already obliged to speak and understand English.
The court was unimpressed by their argument and ordered the airline to comply.

Happy Thanksgiving! I'll be back on Tuesday......

Read - French versus English Volume 15