After two years, my campaign to rid the nation of its “human rights” commissions doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. So, in a spirit of rapprochement, let me try a new tack. Given that there seems to be insufficient actionable racism, sexism, homophobia and Islamophobia to justify the budgets of the “human rights” regime, how about a new ground for complaint?
Unilinguaphobia.
As we know, every job that matters in Canada is bilingual, from her viceregal eminence in Rideau Hall down to the village postmistress in Pakenham, Ont. The House of Commons has just passed, all but unnoticed, a bill requiring that henceforth all Supreme Court justices should be able to hear cases in English and French without the aid of an interpreter. That’s to say, it’s not enough to be a distinguished jurist capable of a little light banter with a francophone colleague or a discussion of Denys Arcand’s oeuvre at a Canada Council cocktail party: you have to be able to understand highly technical legalisms in a language other than your own, unaided. As things stand, three of the nine judges have to come from Quebec. If the new bill takes effect, it’s hard to imagine any jurist west of Ontario ever meeting the qualifications.
As the Ottawa Citizen’s Dan Gardner recently pointed out (full disclosure: he thinks I’m an alarmist buffoon, so he’s obviously a reliable source), a rip-roaring total of 9.4 per cent of Canadian anglophones are bilingual. This was, of course, M. Trudeau’s great insight when he presided over the expansion of official bilingualism from the very modest provisions of the British North America Act: as the minority, francophones would have the greater incentive to learn the other language, and thus, being overrepresented among the bilingual labour pool, would increase their presence at the highest levels of Canadian life. Yet, even among francophones, only 42 per cent are bilingual.
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Yes indeed its a strange country where a minority group (Francophone Power) rules over the majority (ROC) and where we have a publicly funded segregated school system based on religion (catholic) and language (French).
And how does Quebecistan reward Canada for all of this, they make their nation unilingually French and have language police to enforce their language laws.
Unlike the udder provinces, Quebecistan has more autonomy and control over its own affairs. Quebecers control their own state pension scheme and immigration system. Quebecers hold 34% of the seats on the Supreme Court despite having only about 25% of the population. And now they are demanding that all of the supreme court justices be bilingual.
Until recently, a Quebecer has been PM for virtually all of the last 35 years.
The other provinces should have all the same rights, privileges and opportunities as Quebec does. Will that happen, nope cause all of the federal political parties run scared of ‘Francophone Power.’
Probably why a January 27th Leger Poll indicated that English Canadians view immigrants more favourably than they do French Quebecers.
Ontarians had the most favourable views when it came to Jews (78%) and aboriginal Canadians (59%) second most favourable on immigrants (72%).
http://www.languagefairness.ca/