🚀 go-pugleaf

In message <32374FE1.734E@mlink.net> - Elie Charest <turgon@mlink.net>Wed, 11
Sep 1996 19:48:49 -0400 writes:

[snip]
:>What we have here are two visions: one in the realm of the "official"
:>word, where Anglophones cannot put signs in English only and Francos
:>outside of Quebec can supposedly live in French. 

*** Your distinction between the 'official' realm the "real world"
    (discussed below) is a useful one.

    The word "can" as you have used it implies "permission"
    or "regulation" by some Government.  
 
    In exactly this sense - anywhere in the Free World except 
    Quebec you "can" use any language you like to put up signs 
    or otherwise "speak" to anyone you want. The usefulness
    (= readership) of a sign in URDU might be low in Toronto
    but there is no law against it.  In Quebec it (URDU) would be 
    prohibited entirely on a bus or large freestanding roadside
    sign and dwarfed by a mandtory French translation anywhere
    else.          
     
    In Canada we require that the Federal and some Provincial
    Governments are staffed so that residents "can" be served
    in either French or English.  This adds some expense to 
    the cost of Government, and discriminates against a Gov. job
    for people from unilingual areas of the country if they 
    failed to learn the 'other' national language well enough
    in school or in some other way.  For 30 years the people 
    of Canada have accepted the extra cost and the unavoidable
    employment discrimination as a 'fair' price to pay. (It
    provides an economic incentive to learn the other language
    to get a Gov. job -- (and sadly roughly half of us work for the 
    Gov more or less.)   
      
:>The other is the actual
:>real world, where it's a LOT easier to live in english in Montreal than
:>it is to live in French in the greater part of Anglophone Canada. 

*** I agree with what you say - but the reason for the ease 
    in Montreal is --in spite of-- not because of Quebec 
    Gov. policy.  The real reason is that there are more 
    mother tounge English in Montreal than the total population
    of the smaller Canadian provinces.  This is an accident
    of Montreal history, just as French in Quebec is an accident
    of Quebec history.   

    On the other hand most of Anglophone Canada was settled 
    and developed by English speaking people. Another accident
    of history. (Yes I know, some localities had early 
    French settlements and French was discriminated against
    ending not too too long ago.)  

    Few people in China speak either French or English, another 
    accident of history.  This reality is immune to wishes, 
    or legislation.              

    So it is foolish to complain about the lack of English 
    people to talk to in the Sagenuay P.Q. or French people to 
    talk to in Victoria BC.  How could you expect personal 
    experience to be different.  That is never what "official"
    bilingualism in Canada meant or promised - yet secessionists 
    use this argument repeatedly (the supposed failure of bilingualism) 
    as an argument for secession.
    
 :>Care to argue?

**** Sure -- see above ;-)