On getting an English eligibility certificate?
The Gazette claims that if you don’t already have an English eligibility certificate, and you’re an adult, you can’t get one.
Even so, I think I’ll dig through my very old paper storage archive to find the final transcript of my marks from high school. They never gave us anything fancier by way of a diploma, but it does prove I was in school here in English, back in the dark ages.
Ian 08:41 on 2024-08-04 Permalink
If this is going to be a thing, the CAQ needs to issue ethnic identity cards. Seriously. They need to mechanize this ethnonationalism or drop it; as it is, they are just being bigoted AND incompetent.
Uatu 08:44 on 2024-08-04 Permalink
Well I know I’ll be served in French by my imaginary GP since I’m still waiting for one…. Priorities, right?
Kate 09:05 on 2024-08-04 Permalink
Ian, that’s a great idea. A scarlet letter A for Anglo.
Ian 09:27 on 2024-08-04 Permalink
I was thinking more along the lines of a code digitally associated with your medicare card but sure, why not? Or maybe a serial number with an identifying lettercode, in a convenient form that you wouldn’t forget at home like, say, an armband. Or a tattoo.
Blork 17:47 on 2024-08-04 Permalink
I’m basically f*cked since I didn’t go to school here. I find it hard enough to understand what doctors and other medical people are saying even when they speak in English, so even if I doubled down on improving my French I’ll still always be lost. Plus there’s the frustration over the very Kafkaesque idea that when I’m speaking to an anglophone doctor I’m not allowed to speak to them in English because of some abstract paranoia-based law. I guess I need to get used to the fact that when it comes to healthcare I’m pretty much on my own.
Ian 22:32 on 2024-08-05 Permalink
Me neither, but seriously, if you can prove that you are “ayant droit” for education or that your kids were/ are/ could be (whether or not you had kids) and it’s predicated on having attended primary or high school in English, then it shou ldbe a relatively easy process. Show your school record, your provincial ID gets chaged and it applies to you and all your descendants. This business of showing school records to show that one of your kids can go to school in English but not having it automatically apply to yourself and your other kids is just, well, stupid.
I mean, stupid within the context of insisting that people show identification to prove their right to receive basic rights such as receiving provincial government services such as hospital care in their language as recognized by federal law. Shades of “geben sie mir seinen papieren”, nicht wahr? Camps weren’t the first step. Ethnonationalism and making the “other” into the “enemy” was.