French versus English Volume 48

Bilingualism war in Ontario hospital

"CORNWALL, Ontario - A community in eastern Ontario has decided to withhold funding for the renovation of the Cornwall Community Hospital (CCH) to protest against the bilingual policy of the institution.
In January 2011, the hospital was designated to deliver services in French under the Act respecting French language services in Ontario. According to the Mayor of South Stormont, Bryan McGillis,  unilingual anglophone nurses cannot get a job in the facility.
"I have received several complaints last year from English-speaking nurses who say they have no chance for advancement in their careers (in hospital)," said Mr. McGillis.
The City Council has chosen this week to no longer pay the $ 30,000 yearly hospital fee. This sum is part of a total budget of $300,000 which is supposed to be paid by the municipality between 2006 and 2015 to cover part of the $120 million redevelopment project.

The former director of the board of the Cornwall Community Hospital, Dany Tombler, even suggested citizens refrain from giving gifts to the hospital.
Deputy Mayor of South Stormont, Tammy Hart, has already denounced French signage in the past.
"Language policy is a blatant injustice against the English-speaking citizens of the region," she said.

Mayor McGillis also argues that language rights should not prevent someone from finding work.
The Chair of the Board of Directors of HCC, Helene Periard, is concerned that the council resolution of South Stormont will interfere with the fundraising campaign of the hospital.
However, she defended the bilingualism policy because it gives the institution the ability to serve the Francophone community."  Read the original story by Greg Peerenboom in French 

Madeleine Meilleur, Minister Responsible for Francophone Affairs writing in the Ottawa Sun, offered a spirited defense of the government's bilingual position;

"I happened to be a nurse before being a minister. I know the extent to which, for a Franco-Ontarian, receiving health care in French is a matter of quality care and not a linguistic quirk.

I observed the fragility of francophone patients who, although bilingual, were more comfortable speaking in French. French is also an integral part of the professional skills required to offer quality services to francophone patients." Read the rest of the story

Elite French B-School offers English degree

Quebec's top French business school the École des hautes études commerciales (HEC) of the Universite de Montreal has offered English to some degree for a number of years, but now in an effort to attract a more diverse student body, is offering a complete MBA degree to students who will no longer have to take any French courses at all.
Kathleen Grant the director of communications said;
 "These students will not completely escape French. They will go to the cafeteria to eat "pâté chinois" instead of "Chinese pie." (she meant to say "Sheperd's Pie.') They hear French every day and are immersed in a French environment," ...Ahem

As you can imagine Jean-Paul Perreault, president  of Impératif français is sorely disappointed. According to the French language militant,  the argument that English is the language of business is fallacious and should not motivate changes in course offerings of universities. Read the story in French 

The two faces of the Ndp..

"Is this collage a metaphor for duplicitous Ndp policy?

Docs describe dangerous French-Canadian disease

A while back, I linked to a story that indicated that francophone Quebecers had a shorter lifespan than Anglos.
Experts attributed this to lifestyle differences, but this story, recently posted, may offer a different reason;

"Some U.S. doctors are urging patients to get checked out for a potentially deadly genetic disease they say was passed down from French-Canadian forefathers.

The hereditary ailment causes dangerously high cholesterol levels and is particularly prevalent in certain parts of Quebec.

Maine cardiologist Dr. Robert Weiss said there is an unusually high number of cases of the disease in the region near the city of Lewiston, which welcomed waves of French-Canadian migrant workers in the late 1800s". Read the rest of the story

'The French are right to resist Global English'

By Christopher Caldwell  for the Financial Post

 "One of the odd stories to come out of the French-speaking province of Quebec last year was the announcement that intensive English courses would be offered to students in state schools. Odd, because in the past half-century, much of the Quebecois identity has been built on resisting English. Authorities throw the book at people for doing things that would be normal elsewhere in Canada. Last autumn, the Montreal newspaper La Presse revealed that two real estate executives had made presentations in English to a Montreal-based pension fund, violating the province’s language laws, which give workers the right to a French-speaking environment.

Now, school authorities in Quebec City are questioning whether the time is ripe for introducing those English classes after all. Their hesitation has left French-speaking parents angry. On one hand, those parents want their children to cherish their own community and its language. On the other hand, English is the international language of business, and their children will have a hard time climbing the social ladder without it.

Self-contradiction besets all governments as they try to work out a role for English in their national culture...."       Read the rest of the story..... Link Alternate Link

Pardon our French

"More than 45,000 Manitobans say the first language they learned as a child was French, yet more than 96% of them report speaking just as much, if not more, English on a daily basis.

So if that’s the case, is it really worth it for governments, cultural organizations and schools to promote the use of French?

Well, pardon our French, but you’d better believe it, say Manitoba francophones.

“It’s the fundamental principle of the Canadian federation: linguistic duality. We want Canada to be a country where there’s a strong and vibrant presence of French-speaking communities not just in Quebec, but across the country,” said Guy Jourdain, executive director of the provincial government’s Francophone Affairs Secretariat." Read the rest of the story

By the way, at that same link there's a funny video of English Winnipeggers trying to pronounce French street names.

Chasing conventions away

The international convention business is something every city tries desperately to attract, the economic spinoffs are so important that most cities invest heavily in facilities and even offer subsidies to attract them. A three to five day convention can easily dump up to ten million dollars into the host city's hotel and restaurant industry. More importantly, these dollars come from outside the community and represent an economic windfall. Like any other city, Quebec City does its best to attract such conventions and has recently landed a pretty big one in SportAccord International Convention which will take place in May.
Of course the usual language critics have come out of the woodwork to complain that the organization, which reunites the various sports federations related to the Olympic movement, operates in English only.
It seems that not only do language militants want to control language in Quebec, they want international organizations that choose Quebec as their destination for conventions to operate in French as well.
Commenting on the situation  Impératif français, Jean-Paul Perreault said that the situation was 'humiliating' and 'contemptuous;'

 "In the national capital, to see that a conference on an issue as important as sports,  will operate with a highly anglicized content, where  the website is not even available in French, where the place of French will be trivialized, that in itself is quite revolting. "  Link{Fr}

This isn't an isolated incident, last year our intrepid defender of the faith Louis Prefontaine complained to the OQLF about another convention held in English, The International Water Association. Link{Fr}

My favorite complaint about unilingual conventions comes from a militant website where a reader complained that a notice, stuck up on a door to a meeting room in the Universite de Montreal was in English only.
It seemed a little strange, so I did a little research and found out that a small, American knitting group, called the Pattern Review, had organized a weekend trip to Montreal and rented out accommodations at the university dorms (it was summer.)
Perhaps next time this intrepid group of sewers comes to Quebec to spend money, they make place on the bus for a translator, so that students won't be offended by an English sign!!

The pot calling the kettle black

I chuckled over this story written by Gilles Proulx, Quebec's most vocal defender of the French language.
After visiting Haiti he complained about the wide use of Creole on the island, a dialect of French that he finds distasteful.

"A disturbing phenomenon: There is widespread use of Creole, even among radio hosts, and this idiom is disjointing the French language. Signs are also often in Creole. The Haitian people risk cutting themselves off from the world by falling back on its Patois, says the President of the Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Haiti, Herve Denis, a graduate of Laval University, who married a Quebecois. Link{Fr}

(Thanks to SAMUEL for the story)

Smells like 'bullsheet!'

Our good friend Mario Beaulieu, president and chief bottle washer of a bunch of French language supremacist organizations has once again given us the benefit of his wonderful statistical analysis.

"In 2006 Statistics Canada reported that  86 % of young francophones rated their knowledge of English as passable to excellant.  Link{Fr}

Hmmm.... Considering that only about 50% of Francophone Quebecers can speak any English at all it's quite an interesting figure!!

War on religion continues to rage

In the raging war between religion and the Quebec education department, parents wishing to excuse their children from the generic 'all-religions-are-equal-and-good' study course, (mandatory for all students) lost their appeal in the Supreme Court.
Adding insult to injury, a Quebec teacher, with the backing of her principal, removed the last line from a famous Edith Piaf song because it mentioned God, much to the chagrin of just about everyone, including the minister of education.

 

No French please, we're Flemish!

Readers might recall a story about how a French school board in Montreal has banned any other language but French from its schoolyard. Here's an amusing story of the shoe being fitted to the other foot;

"Children are being punished with detention and language lessons if they are caught speaking French in the playground of Sint-Pieters college, a primary school in a Flemish-speaking suburb of Brussels. One father attacked the policy at Sint-Pieterscollege because it threatened to punish children, too young to choose their mother tongue, for a conflict being fought out between French- and Dutch-speaking adults tussling for political control of Belgium.

''This is linguistic wickedness,'' he told La Capitale newspaper. ''It is not fair and affects only French-speaking kids. The school's decision is dangerous.'' Link

OQLF reveals 'special' relationships

The Office québécois de la langue française, (OQLF) has revealed that it has entered into 'special' language agreements with over 60 companies, allowing them to operate partially outside the terms of Bill 101.
The companies are generally head offices that operate branch locations outside Quebec and/or companies doing research or very involved in very high tech enterprises, like Bombardier, which is asking the OQLF to allow 4,000 employees to work exclusively in English.
These waivers have been going on since 1981, but the numbers have slowly diminished.
For a list of the related companies see the list HERE.
(Credit for the story ...Lord Dorchester)

Sugar Sammy sells out bilingual concert

It's still nice to know that there are people out there who love and enjoy speaking English and French and are proud to embrace another culture. 

Fully one third of Quebec Anglophones make a life for themselves with a Francophone spouse and so there's not as much animosity out there as militants on both sides would have us believe.
Its even possible for federalists and sovereigntists to be friends, I know because I live this reality everyday.
The media doesn't talk about cooperation and even blogs like mine play up the differences because, unfortunately, harmony is not an interesting read. 

I regret that if my missives come off leaving the impression that I dislike francophones, NOTHING cold be further from the truth. 
I complain because I want things to get better.

Jut the same, things are pretty good. In Montreal where I live, there isn't the language tension that outsiders, those in the RoC or RoQ imagine.
We seem to get along fairly well.
Nobody talks about the good things, the cooperation, the camaraderie and friendships that cross ethnic and linguistic lines in Quebec, because it doesn't sell newspapers, as they say.


For thirty years, I played in a garage hockey league where everyone was welcome. The dressing room was a magical Tower of Babel, where everyone kidded each other in all sorts of languages.
I call this the "ALLEZ, shoot!' phenomenon.


Montreal comedian Sugar Sammy is a product of the Bill 101 generation, son of an immigrant family, he was forced into French school, but just the same adopted and embraced Anglophone culture.


Now many French language militants will find this offensive, but it is a Quebec reality.


Emerging as one of Canada's best comedians, he is doing something that I don't believe anyone has tried before, a bilingual comedy concert.

Now if you'd have asked me before, I'd have said that there's a market for something like that, albeit pretty small.
Well, Sugar Sammy has sold out the entire run of thirty concert dates. Impressive.


Concert goers better have a thick skin, whether you are English, French or Ethnic he is going to get you and his observations are not only humorous, but caustic and biting.

He is the quintessential Montrealer, bilingual, urbane, confident and successful. 
Catch a bit of his shtick here.

Watch Sugar Sammy do his thing in French WITH PAULINE MAROIS!!!   HERE