Thanos Thanos:
1) Bilingualism is OK where it's needed.
2) In most parts of the the country it's not needed.
3) At some point it becomes prohibitively expensive and kind of pointless to provide a service where it's not required.
4) In some parts of the country it makes no sense to provide this service in French anyway. Go to Vancouver and Mandarin or whatever it is the Sikhs and Hindus speak are more logical choices for a second language.
5) No one in most of the rest of Canada really cares what Quebec does with their own internal policies. Majority French in Quebec = government services provided in French. Fairly logical to do things this way It was when those policies got forced on the rest of the country during the Trudeau era that people got pissed off. This country has a greater destiny waiting for us than focussing all the time on the gratification of Quebec and other minority groups.
Okay, so what happens if you happen to be travelling through Quebec and end up needing some sort of government service? Wouldn't you want to be provided with those services in English? Same thing applies, in reverse, to French Quebecers who are travelling elsewhere in Canada and may not speak English as well as they could.
Incidentally, Trudeau's bilingualism efforts were in large part an attempt to reestablish what was originally supposed to be the bilingualism of the Prairies-Alberta, for one, only became largely English-speaking due to gross violations of the original constitutional arrangements that founded this province and an active attempt to forcibly assimilate the French Canadians.
Trudeau's efforts were undermined by his not even trying to explain to people in other parts of Canada just why he was doing it. Many Albertans and other Westerners didn't understand the basis for bilingualism, or the violations of the original arrangements by which the West was supposed to be bilingual, and was de facto bilingual for a long time. Of course, Trudeau being Trudeau, he was largely indifferent to the often quite understandable protests people out here were making.
You'd be surprised at the role French Canadians played in building Alberta, to the extent that they were largely the ones who set the table for the settlement that would come later and convinced many of the First Nations to sign the Treaties. And it's funny how French is actually the language that some immigrants from French-speaking countries like Rwanda or the Congo are using to communicate with other Canadians outside their ethnic group-I know this because a number of them were my fellow students at the U of A's francophone campus. At least in the Edmonton area, and probably also elsewhere, the Franco-Albertan community is becoming more multicultural and diverse too. It's not just the descendants of white Franco-Quebecers anymore.
andyt andyt:
We were founded by the French and English. That's why French gets a special place. And Quebec makes a large part of Canadian identity. Without Quebec, we'd pretty soon look much like the US, I think. Nothing wrong with bilingualism, just in its ridiculous extremes, and how we're willing to allow Quebec to trample over free speech rights to enforce their specialness. (WTF is wrong with this spell checker when it doesn't like specialness?) I'm kinda proud of bilingualism. Makes us seem more cosmopolitan.
Excellent points. The only caveat I'd add is that the Aboriginals could be seen as the third founding community as well. And it's also notable how some immigrants are using French, rather than English, to initially get on in Canadian society. They're making French Canada more diverse as well, even if it's going at a slower pace than English Canada.
As for Quebec, that province is in a pretty dicey situation in North America. Every other part of the continent has an English-speaking (or Spanish-speaking if you want to include Mexico) majority, with some recognition for minority languages (French in the other Canadian provinces, Spanish in several American states, etc.) Quebec, on the other hand, is not only the only part of North America where French is the majority, but it also has its own English-speaking minority to deal with. Hence Quebec has had to figure out how to maintain its own Francophone character while also accommodating its Anglophone minority.
For all the good he did in a number of areas, Trudeau really muddied the waters in regards to Quebec and how exactly it meshes with the rest of Canada. I'll explain some more if anyone's interested, but this post has gone on long enough...
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