With the unprecedented collapse of the Montreal Canadiens, out of the playoffs before the snow even falls, a dejected and angry Quebec media has turned instead its attention to the blood sport of bashing Anglophones, which has reached a dangerous tipping point sparked by the CEO of Air Canada's lack of French during a yearly review.
The visceral outrage in the French media is wholly disproportionate to the slight and has engendered nothing less than mass language hysteria.
Politicians have piled onto the wagon of righteous indignation led by our illustrious Prime Minister calling it "an unacceptable
situation,'' noting that the minister in charge of official languages is
''following up.''
The irony of Trudeau's complaint represents the ultimate hypocrisy, having himself appointed a Governor-General who cannot speak French either.
Why a non-French-speaking CEO of a for-profit company is less acceptable than a non-French-speaking Governor-General begs a response.
The apoplectic French Quebec media reaction can be understood by the very painful truth that was laid bare by Mr. Rousseau,
Firstly, that Air Canada is an English corporation, run completely in English and a company that would have decamped its head office to Toronto years ago had it not been blackmailed into staying in Montreal by the Caisse de Depot.
The second painful truth laid bare is that yes, you still can live and work in Montreal without speaking French.
The Horror of Horrors.
Mr. Rousseau can be credited, like the fabled little boy who declared "that the emperor hath no clothes" in exposing the obvious language reality, one that nationalists refuse to face by pretending it isn't true.
It is the same nonsense whereby eliminating English signage in Montreal is meant to foster the fiction that Montreal is other than a bilingual city.
The echo chamber nature of Francophone media is best demonstrated by the universal adoption of the word "Rhodesian" to describe Anglos like Mr. Rousseau who don't speak French or activists like myself who speak French perfectly but who reject the notion that Quebec is a "nation," and that Quebec is a "French Nation" or that everyone living in Quebec is "obliged to "Respect the French majority"
Journalists and opinion writers have invoked the scourge of "Rhodesian" an alternate term for "White Supremacist" to describe Anglos and ethnics who don't abide.
My favourite "Rhodesian" reference comes from the tiresome ethnocentric blowhard Mathieu Bock-Coté, who referred to the black Mayoral candidate Balarama Holness as a white supremacist... "a Neo-Rhodesian." no less! He also wrote this:
"Sadly, it is an old habit among radical Anglos, who have always behaved like local Rhodesians, to criminalize our collective aspiration to protect our language and place it at the heart of collective life."All of these journalists have no problem describing Quebec Anglos as toxic white supremacists but paradoxically whine about Quebec-bashing in the English media.
I wonder if they'd be okay with the Montreal Gazette or the National Post publishing an opinion piece where Quebec language militants were described as "fanatical language Nazis"
Quebec is living a language fantasy, one woven by nationalists and sovereigntists which the media and its populist politicians have wholeheartedly embraced.
Quebec is a nation
Quebec is a French nation
Minorities owe the francophone majority respect
The French language is in decline.
Not speaking French is contemptuous of the majority
Ottawa mistreats and disrespects Quebec
Quebec culture is superior.
The English media bashes Quebec
blah...blah blah.
I'll counter these arguments in a future post but let me leave with a fanciful opinion piece written by Marc Bellemare, an ex-Justice minister under Jean Charest who demonstrates the ability to completely spin reality.
After 1976, several Quebecers boycotted Sun Life, which had announced the transfer of its head office to Ontario in response to René Lévesque's rise to power. In 1978, the boycott of confectioner Cadbury, who moved production to Ontario after 60 years in Montreal, hurt and served as a warning to many others.
Like me, will you dare to boycott Air Canada whenever you have the chance? Marc Bellemare
Unlike Sun Life most slinked out of the province quietly and without fanfare, unnoticed and unremarked upon by a government and media that wished to whitewash the exodus.
The next time a language hardliner takes a less convenient or more expensive airplane to Miami in order to boycott Air Canada, they'll be doing it board an airline that cares even less about French.
And we all know, it ain't gonna happen, anyways because talk is cheap.
At any rate, the language delirium has struck our Premier rather hard.
Buoyed by the enthusiastic embrace of his hard-line and discriminatory policies Legault has lost his marbles and channelled the mythical King Canute who set his throne by the seashore and commanded the incoming tide to halt and not wet his feet and robes.
Our illustrious Premier has complained that there aren't enough Quebecers (read-Francophone Quebecers) in the National Hockey League and has hatched a plan to change the situation.
The media in the rest of Canada is silent about suppression of languages other then French and forced demographic change that Quebec engages in. If the rest of Canada found out, it would be harder for these federal parties to court Quebec by allowing suppression of minority language rights.
ReplyDeleteWhen Quebecois "nationalistes" talk about immigrants coming to Quebec, they don't mention that the vast majority of immigrants come to Montreal. Montreal does not reflect the demographics of the Quebec regions. Montreal would be better off outside Quebec in a different province.
In my opinion Montreal and other bilingual areas of Quebec should be partitioned off and merged with bilingual areas of Ontario to create a bilingual province like New Brunswick.
J@rry P@rk
Hey, J.P.! Your comments border on plagiarism, and I know you've been reading the posts here for too long! Read back the last half-dozen editorials or so. For shame, J.P., for shame!
DeleteHi Mr Sauga,
DeleteWhats that saying, "Imitation is the best form of flattery"
J@rry P@rk
I've heard repeatedly in the past few weeks how "spoiled" anglophones are here (hence the "Rhodesian" analogy). Whenever you suggest that maybe you might not be part of a subversive minority population worthy of their hatred, you are inevitably told how much worse it is for francophones in the RoC. If you ever question this assumption (which I do), francophones will think that you're crazy or in denial. But let's examine this for a second. The primary complaints of francophones in other provinces tend to be related to the fact that most people in the RoC can't speak French well, if at all : mistranslated signs and pamphlets, lack of government announcements in French, lack of an ability to request that they be communicated with in French which requesting government services, etc.
ReplyDeleteIt's true that in Quebec, most francophones can speak English much better than other Canadians can speak French, and that the Quebec government translates a lot more things into English than other governments (in Alberta or Saskatchewan, for example) translate into French, for which I am grateful. The only fully independent French-language university outside of Quebec is in New Brunswick (though other French language *campuses* exist, like Campus Saint Jean of the University of Alberta, this is never raised for some reason).
But what are the complaints of anglophones in Quebec? They tend to be things like :
* banning francophones and immigrants from English schools, even if their first language is English or they come from an English-speaking country and they're Canadian citizens. Heck, even if you're a born Canadian citizen who was educated in another country, you still can't access the English schools. This is why enrollment is declining and the native anglophone population decreasing (which I suspect was always the point).
* government regulations to prevent the speaking of non-French languages in the workplace
* banning signs in English (or any other language) if they are displayed in public (which is part of Bill 96)
* harassing English businesses with OQLF language inspectors if they display non-French languages in any context (I'm sure we can all think of ridiculous OQLF stories)
* only offering access to official government communications to people who have a certificate to receive education in English (which again, is a smaller and smaller group of people)
Now quick question : does the Rest of Canada do ANY of that to French ? Any of it ? And what would be the reaction of the Journal de Montreal types if they *did* do that ?
Try to imagine a universe in which the government of Ontario (whose francophone minority is smaller than Quebec's anglophone one) decided to use the notwithstanding clause to ban all non-English signage, and tried to force employers to justify why their employees needed to speak a language other than English? Or revoked a municipality's bilingual status if it fell under 50% native French speakers? Or restricted access to Ontario's French university campuses to "historic francophones", like the government is doing to CEGEPS ?
Ontario actually *can't* ban native French speakers from accessing its French school system; Quebec has an exemption from Section 23(1)(a) of the Charter, which would ordinarily require this (Section 59 of the Constitution Act of 1982); so naturalized Belgian Canadians have a right to a French education in B.C., but naturalized American Canadians don't have a right to an English one in Quebec.
Do you think that our Premier would say "Well, we're doing the same in Quebec for French. It's only fair" ?
We all know the answer of course; imagine the reaction when Doug Ford didn't want to pay $50 million for a new a French university, except three orders of magnitude more hysterical. If we contrasted the currently reality with the hypothetical reality I posited just now, it's not difficult to see which world most Canadian francophones would rather live in.
YO, Joe M: You wrote "Now quick question : does the Rest of Canada do ANY of that to French? Any of it? And what would be the reaction of the Journal de Montreal types if they *did* do that?"
DeleteThere are more French schools in Ontario than English schools in Quebec, yet there are fewer Franco Ontarians than English speaking Quebecers. How about that?
Too many readers here, and in the rest of Canada in general, seem to be overlooking an obvious problem that will magnify as time goes by: In one of her last duties as Minister of Official Languages, Mélanie Joly passed Bill C-32 requiring that future appointment of Supreme Court judges and other certain senior federal civil servants, regardless of what part of Canada they come from, MUST...repeat, MUST be bilingual.
Why T F must people from the outer reaches of B.C. and Newfoundland, and all other points in between outside Quebec, be bilingual when Quebec is striving evermore towards unilingualism? What T F is that, and why aren't far more people outside Quebec not up in arms about this?
I can only hypothesize that for now, ignorance is bliss, but in time this will become a bigger problem yet nobody is neither saying nor doing thing one to curb what will before too long become an escalating problem.
Was Bill C-32 passed or just introduced as a bill?
Delete@Joseph M - correct, there's a qualitative difference here - one side is whining against passive oppression/aggression (we're not getting enough attention, we're not getting enough services, noone is taking us seriously), while in the other side is whining against active oppression/aggression (banning, picketing, editorializing, pressuring, nudging, forcing, legislating, threatening). Definitely two different things conflated by Quebecor apparatchiks into one.
DeleteTony K.: I thought I heard it passed, based on the way Mélanie Joly was talking about it, but perhaps it didn't...yet. Thomas Mulcair is largely in favour of it, but having dual heritage, it would be familial suicide for him not to walk the tightrope. https://montrealgazette.com/opinion/columnists/tom-mulcair-heres-why-the-new-official-languages-bill-is-welcome
DeleteSomehow, writes Mulcair, it won't affect the English speakers one way or the other. I strongly disagree for the reasons stated in my postings, esp. the machinations of (Quebec's) Bill 96.
Maybe forcing airlines like porter to be bilingual will force a discussion in the rest of Canada about Quebecs language chauvanism and hyppcrisy. A language debate in the rest of Canada might force the political parties to tone down their sucking up to Quebec for votes. At least one can hope so.
DeleteJ@rry P@rk
I am of the opinion that Quebec Francophones that attend English post secondary education institutions anywhere in the world should be prohibited from a position of minister in any Quebec government. Let's see how francophone elites, with their penchand for elite English language university, will react to that!
ReplyDeleteMMC: Fat chance! Ideally, I do like what you're saying, but going back to the first PQ cabinet, the following, from my memory going back 45 years, went to post-secondary institutions outside Quebec: Jacques Parizeau: London School of Economics; Jacques-Yvan Morin: Harvard U and Cambridge; Denis Lazure: U of Philadelphia; Claude Morin: Columbia U.; Camille Laurin, the Josef Goebbels of Quebec himself: Boston University. There may be others, but I have no inclination to look them up.
DeletePhil wrote: "The irony of Trudeau's complaint represents the ultimate hypocrisy, having himself appointed a Governor-General who cannot speak French either."
ReplyDeleteAfter the previous G.G., that F.C.* Julie Payette, performed and who still will get her post-appointment goodies after only two years on the job, I guess Trudope had to even the score.
"Why a non-French-speaking CEO of a for-profit company is less acceptable than a non-French-speaking Governor-General begs a response".
Ideally, I'd like to think that an English speaking First Nation's person is only fair after the F.C.* that preceded her was just that...an F.C.*
MarcManCan: Good one!
*F.C. in this case has two meanings: The first is French Canadian, the second I'll leave to the readers' collective imaginations, and it is that second meaning I'm leaning to far more!
OK, time for my own comment that is not a response to the foregoing contributors. Actually, my comments over the years have said it all, so I'm really going to point out a more ancillary topic that was touched upon in Philip's commentary.
ReplyDeleteDuring one of the intermissions of the Saturday night weekly HNIC broadcast, Ron McLean, Kelly Hrudy et al talked about the Quebec Government discussing the intention in the acquisition of bringing an NHL team back to Quebec, i.e., the return of the Nordiques, with NHL Commissioner, Gary Bettman. Apparently certain Quebec officials, government and I suppose lieutenants of private industry (Quebec has no French speaking captains of industry, the loser state that it is).
First of all, I can't see the NHL expanding any further. At long last, the NHL this season has finally balanced the number of teams binarily. Now the NHL has two conferences that have an equal quantity of teams, and two divisions in each conference that to has an equal quantity of teams. Now there will be half the teams making the playoffs, a sizable number with 32 teams (traditionally, when the NHL was smaller, about 2/3rds of the teams made the playoffs) and that will be worth plenty of money. Playoffs are all gravy to team owners as the League determines the prize money PER TEAM based on how well they progress in the playoffs, the teams don't have to pay their players' salaries yet the teams make far more money thanks to that savings plus playoff tickets go for higher prices than regular season tickets, and escalate depending how far their teams advance.
More importantly, the Seattle Kraken, the newcomers to the League, spent USD 2.13 Billion just to join the League, between building an arena to house the spectators, a practice facility, a farm team to develop prospects and the costs of arenas and other facilities for that team, the application fee, a USD 650 million payable equally to 30 of the other 31 teams in the League.
All Quebec City has done is build a modern arena that is currently way underutilized surmising, in the first place, that if they built an elaborate arena, they (the NHL) will come (i.e., award Quebec City another franchise). Quel surprise! That didn't work out, plus it was the Western Conference that needed to add two teams to balance the League geographically.
Rest assured that the $2.13 billion Seattle had to fork out will be at the USD2.5 billion at least if Quebec City wants a team, and that's probably despite the fact they already sunk big money into an arena that is minus an NHL team. Considering language legislation trumps infrastructure (especially Quebec transportation network), are they willing to sacrifice a fortune more money into a venture of this sort?
Anyway, I'm sure the talks with the NHL brass will mount to just cheap talk as none of the Eastern franchises is in big financial trouble, and as mentioned previously by Gary Bettman, Quebec doesn't have a corporate base to support a team, so at best it will all fall on the taxpayer. Bonne chance!
To clarify a couple of things above, the last paragraph implies that it would take the financial faltering an Eastern Conference team to possibly be transplanted to Quebec City vs unlikely expansion (much like the 1995 Nordiques transplanted to Denver).
DeleteThe USD $650 million was the entry fee that Seattle had to pay to all but the last expansion team, Vegas. Vegas had to pay $500 million to enter back in 2017, so to be sure, inflation will play a major role should, in the unlikeliest of events, Quebec be awarded a transplanted team. Uh-uh, ain't gonna happen!
Legault is creating a win/win situation for himself here. In the unlikely event that Quebec City is awarded a franchise he wins. In the very likely event that the city does not get a franchise, he can rally the Quebecois around the horror of the Quebec nation being rejected by the big, hostile English gang of NHL franchise owners - headed by a Jew of all things - and then have them all condemned via a unanimously supported motion among members of Quebec's provincial national assembly.
ReplyDeleteHey, HJS!: What's your point? English translation: Who cares? The NHL H.Q. left Montreal years ago (gee, I wonder why?); furthermore, who cares? Let Quebec stand on it's loser head for all anyone cares, including me.
DeleteI will miss that 16-year rivalry, but it we're now 27 seasons down the road from then, so again, who cares? Life goes on!
Wow, I never even knew that NHL headquarters was in Montreal.
DeleteJ.P.: I don't remember the exact year the NHL HQ left Montreal, but it was when Clarence Campbell was its last president. American John Zeigler followed, then Gil Stein (for a ver-r-r-r-r-y short time) and now Gary Bettman circa 1992. When Bettman took over, the position was entitled Commissioner and President was declared obsolete.
DeleteThanks to the Americans, our game is nowhere near what it used to be. Bettman loves gimmicks, like no more tie games, "overtime loser points" (in the standings), removal of the two-line offside, etc. Don't be surprised if the season has to be moved forward to September or back to July as you can be sure there will be a move to have more teams make the playoffs (even though 32 is the perfect number of teams for a binarized system where 16 teams make it, the other half don't).
One thing is certain, Anglos have a persecution complex.
ReplyDeleteAnon, I'm probably falling for your trolling, but I'll state it once.
DeleteNo, it is the Francos who have that persecution complex. Why? Many reasons as follows:
Quebec has approximately 7 million Francos.
The Jewish population of Quebec is around 90,000, and your the late idolized Abbé Lionel Groulx spewed vitriol in the written and radio media weekly. Why?
Today, there are six billionaires in Quebec who are Jewish. That's one in 15,000.
Comparably, the number of Franco billionaires in terms of ratio is one in 800,000; therefore, that ration works out to 53 1/3 Jewish billionaires to one Franco billionaire. Read it and weep.
British settlers and other minorities took on a work ethic where one reaps what one sews, having smaller, more manageable families, and investing descending generations in post-secondary education and professions.
Francos has ridiculously large families they could barely afford to feed, were subservient to the Roman Catholic Church, were invaded regularly by their clergy to see that meat wasn't being consumed on Fridays and who was in the family way, and if not, why not? "Who will provide?", they asked. God and the government will, they were told. For 200 years, Francos were duped into "Revenge of the Cradles" and other ridiculously false doctrines. The Catholic school system filled the generations' skulls with religious mush vs the "3Rs". Need I go on.
The result: Francos were indeed persecuted...by a corrupt church and the likes of corrupt politicians like Maurice Duplessis. That lead to bitter resentment realized after 200 years, so finally the Church was abandoned in droves, birth control is now practiced and a scapegoat in required to douse that burning revenge after 200 years of being sucked in. Eat your hearts out! You'll NEVER win! Cased closed!
Philip : *cites examples of Anglo-bashing*
ReplyDeleteYou : "You all just have a persecution complex. Why would you think anyone is Anglo-bashing?"
Well Legault has clearly proven to be a wolf in sheeps clothing. Remember in 2018 how he was telling anglophones how he would protect their rights and bla bla bla. Pretty well every major policy his government has come out with is an attack against anglophones or allophones. He divides people much like Trump did..its the us versus them all the time. He is actually more dangerous than the PQ in my opinion because he pretends to be against seperation but his ultimate goal is to make life so difficult for anglos and allos that Ottawa will have to intervene then he will cry like a baby on tv and say the only solution is seperation.
ReplyDeleteHis little sidekick Simon Jolie Barrette is even worse..he must lay awake dreaming all night on how he can take away more rights from anglos and allos. Its a win win for the CAQ..they keep blackmailing Ottawa and Justin keeps giving them exactly what they want. Ultimately Ottawa will say no and boom seperation will be back on the table. By then Canada will have spent tens of billions of money rebuilding this province.
Justin is a disgrace and a sellout..he could care less about non francophones in this province and the greatest irony is they are the group that support Justin the most. WTF??? How about the Quebec liberals who are trying so hard also not to do anything for anglos yet the anglos and allos still vote for them..what an embarassment.
This game will continue until we have an economic crisis..within a year or two..many people will be angry and this anger will be directed against the anglos and allos again.
Complicated: You wrote "Its a win win for the CAQ..they keep blackmailing Ottawa and Justin keeps giving them exactly what they want. Ultimately Ottawa will say no and boom seperation will be back on the table."
ReplyDeleteI must surmise, or at least assume, you're a young'un. The PQ was elected for the first time 45 years ago this month, and this has been going on all that time, so if you think you've come to an epiphany, that surely shows your youth.
I don't know if you remember Stephane Dion, a failed federal Liberal leader. His father implemented the strategy of extorting all it can from Ottawa by figuratively putting a knife to Canada's throat. Sorry, buddy. Nothing new there.
You also wrote: "Justin is a disgrace and a sellout..he could care less about non francophones in this province and the greatest irony is they are the group that support Justin the most. WTF???" Again, absolutely nothing new here. No current federal political party will come to the aid of the Quebec minorities. Alienating Quebec voters means no electoral victories. Anglos and other minorities have been on their own since Daddy Trudeau, and always will be on their own, unless there is a party that will go for it without Quebec voters, or at least the majority there. FAT CHANCE!
Finally, "How about the Quebec liberals who are trying so hard also not to do anything for anglos yet the anglos and allos still vote for them...what an embarrassment." I guess you don't remember the Quebec election of September 1989. Remember the Equality Party? That was the minorities' foray into rebellion. Only four party members were elected, and four years later they were gone. The minorities don't have sufficient clout unless, as I've previously mentioned, the minorities partition Montreal and/or a portion of Quebec, preferably touching the Ontario border, and form another province, but remain federalist.
I was shocked to learn recently that someone had a semi-detached house on Oxford St. in NDG sell for an astounding $945,000 sight unseen! I don't know if you remember the early 1990s when real estate in Montreal didn't move at all! Anyone looking to sell couldn't, or would have to sell at a deep discount. It's a nice sized house, but it's not a mansion. Too, the buyer's plan is to gut the insides and totally renovate. I guess nobody fears separation in the Montreal area, or foreign investors and speculators, after seeing housing bargains in Toronto and Vancouver, now see Montreal real estate as a bargain to park their riches.
There are seats in Montreal where the federal Liberals sometimes garner over 70% of the vote. Many are safe Liberal seats where they parachute candidates. At the local level if anglos/ethnics try to at least get in anti bill 101/96 candidates and/or a political party like the Equality party on the Federal level might help. With the current minority govts at the federal level even 5 or 6 seats could be leveraged.
DeleteI served / worked all accross Canada during my military career, then as a public servant.
ReplyDeleteAll I can say is Anglos quebecers have access to WAY MORE english services/schools/hospitals than francos outside Quebec - whatever the metrics you want to use.
(New Brunswick might be the exception).
What's your point? Metrics? It's a numbers game. Anglos in qc. vs francos outside qc. Anglos in qc also built and/or contributed massively to their institutions vs what francos outside qc. did.
DeleteFrancos in Canada, the best treated minoritiy in all of North America.
I agree, we anglos have access to English language services in Quebec. Here's the thing, it is easy for the QC government to do this cause the anglo population is concentrated in Montreal (a city about 70Km from the border of the US - BTW. In addition, who built and paid for many of the Anglo institutions....
DeleteNot if you compare populated areas of similar size and density. For example, if you compare the services available to the anglos of Blanc Sablon, a remote fishing village on the extreme North Shore of Quebec, with the services available to francophones of Moncton, New Brunswick, then you'll see that the latter have way, way more services.
DeleteThis is true throughout Canada.
This is a function of both economies of scale and critical mass, not language. Yet when Legault stands up before us and says anglo Quebecers are the best treated minority, he never takes this into account. This is a myth that is constantly used to justify NOT ceding to Quebec anglos demands for services they rightsly deserve...and I respectfully suggest you reconsider your position on this. Don't be so quick to buy into Nationalist B.S.
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ReplyDelete