City wants to know how to discriminate
The city has to carry out Bill 96, but wants to know how it can discriminate between those with a right to be spoken to in English, and those without. “How can the person who picks up at the other end of the [311] line know whether the person calling him has the right to have services in English?” asks the chair of the city’s executive committee. How indeed.
azrhey 17:29 on 2022-05-26 Permalink
I am reading this at my Drs office. We usually speak in French to each other because we default to that, but he serves his patients in french, english, spanish, hebrew and arabic. The waiting room is a hodge-podge of anything from Argentine dialect to Pashto and lots of other languages I don’t recognize. The admin staff usually adresses newcomers in French. but sometimes if she has two or three patients in arabic she’ll greet me with that ( gotta love my “non descript mediterranean genes” )… sometimes I answer in English, sometimes I answer in Spanish…. and I love Montreal for all of this!
I was born in France, I did all my school in French, French litt and French linguistics included. And as a bona fide professionelle de la langue française, my opinion is that this bill, and others like this have the exact opposite results that they want. You don’t protect a language by shoving it down people’s throats, you show them how to love using it.
DeWolf 20:19 on 2022-05-26 Permalink
That sums it up beautifully, azrhey, both the problems with this bill and the way Montreal works in real life.
Robert H 12:51 on 2022-05-27 Permalink
@Azrhey : Exactement, parce que la loi 96 est subordonnée à la loi des conséquences imprévues.
J’aimerais organiser une rencontre entre vous et le premier. Vous pouvez jaser un peu, peut-être avec un verre (vin, bière, gin). Essayez de lui parler avec bon sens. Pensez-vous qu’il vous écoutera ?
Oh well, let the lawsuits begin.
azrhey 16:06 on 2022-05-27 Permalink
Il m’écoutera peut-être, mais je suis certaine qu’il ne m’entendrait pas : je ne ferai jamais partie de son électorat cible et pour lui, rien d’autre ne compte.
Uatu 19:27 on 2022-05-27 Permalink
Interesting take in Bill 96 from a Washington Post op Ed:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/05/26/quebec-bill-96-french-language-nationalism/
Robert H 02:39 on 2022-05-28 Permalink
That was interesting Uatu. J.J. McCollough is a talented writer and rhetorician (see his amusing/annoying youtube videos). He makes a sharp argument here against bill 96. His argument would be even sharper if it weren’t stained with Quebec-bashing in particular and francophobia in general. He’s perceptive about the position of Montreal relative to the ROQ, and he compliments the city. But he completely misses the point about Québécois sensitivity to survival of its language and culture. In fact he gleefully mocks it. That alone wins him a following in the ROC and the States. Of course one could say that Bill 96, a classic blunt instrument deserves at least a few sneers. It’s a badly-built contraption that won’t endure, but you don’t fight it by vilifying Quebec and branding it a stain on the otherwise pristine progressive face of Canada.