A Quebec separatist has filed a human rights complaint against a new staff member of Stephen Harper. Why? Because the fellow doesn’t speak French. OMG that’s so despicable, surely ranking up there with the mass-murders orchestrated by Mao, Stalin, Hitler, and Pol Pot!
Fire them all.
h/t Wally J.
BJG
I could be wrong but I have noted that the HRCs are more or less behaving themselves since the majority government took office.
They have declined to hear many complaints…instinctively aware that they have a precarious position. They are smart enough not to make waves and the elected government needs current justification to dismiss them.
A mexican standoff so to speak…
That’s my impression.
If Québec were independent from Canada, a lot of their language policies would not pass UN (ONU) muster for preservation of the rights of linguistic minorities.
Manitoba (and probably Alberta) were supposed to be francophone provinces, but the anglophones did not want federal money to support Catholic schools, and there were no secular French schools in Québec until la Révolution tranquille. (Riel, anyone?)
“If Québec were independent from Canada, a lot of their language policies would not pass UN (ONU) muster for preservation of the rights of linguistic minorities.”
Actually, I somewhat doubt that. The English-language rights of Anglophones in Québec are still far superior to the Spanish-language rights of Hispanic Americans in most US states.
Indeed, the irony is that an independent Québec, surrounded by an ocean of English-speaking countries (the US and whatever would come out of Canada), would have to be more, not less, attuned to the English language! Most separatists don’t even realize that being a province within a larger nation state allows Québec a degree of self-obsession and introversion it would never be able to afford as a sovereign state in North America.
“Manitoba (and probably Alberta) were supposed to be francophone provinces, but the anglophones did not want federal money to support Catholic schools, and there were no secular French schools in Québec until la Révolution tranquille. (Riel, anyone?)”
Ah yes, the old Manitoba schools question. Not really a question of “federal money” per se (at least not directly since schools were and are a provincial matter) – but certainly true that this was an example of the worst kind of anti-French and anti-Catholic bigotry of its day. And it didn’t do much to encourage French Canadians about their prospects outside of Québec.
As for “secular schools”, there were never such things until fairly recently in our history. People seem to forget that non-Catholic public schools were not secular at all but manifestly Protestant in nature.
I have a couple of Anglo friends in Québec who owe their perfect bilingualism to the fact they’re Catholic: the only Catholic school in their small village was French-language and so that’s where they went because their religious affiliation trumped their linguistic one.
Unfortunately, JJM, Spanish speakers in the USA are foreigners, whereas English speakers in Quebec are living in their own country. Compare the status of English Quebeckers with that of, say, English Hawaiians, and tell me how well off they are.
You obviously know nothing at all about the west, so it would be a good idea not to pop off as you do. Manitoba was never “intended” to be a French province, nor has there ever been anything like the kind of anti-Catholic bigotry there that was common in Ontario and English Montreal. And of course French Quebeckers were forbidden by the Chruch from moving west, entirely without regard to the actual state of affairs there. The French in Manitoba were always treated generously and fairly.
And if they didn’t like it, they could go home. The English in Quebec are already home. If they don’t like it, they have to go into exile. Who’s better off, then?