Here's something else to send the last few decent people running screaming from Quebec - cars packed like Okies, on Canada 1 headed West:
http://www.canada.com/globaltv/bc/story.html?id=6aaf855a-47e3-4e3f-8709-5b53dcfffff0
Lileks has a summary of the story today - in short, a 12 year old girl sued her father for grounding her and won. Canadian parents, rejoice! Judges want to raise your children for you! Call them every night and ask if your kids have been good enough to deserve ice cream for dessert, and they'll tell you. No more difficult decisions to make - just call The Honourable Suzanne Tessier and she will answer all your difficult parenting questions.
I grew up listening to Montreal English-language radio, and every year the delightful PQ got a little stranger. English radio stations were forced by law to play more and more French songs, every year the schools would be re-districted (usually in August - to give people lots of warning, you know) and a few more English public schools would be closed. English kids suddenly re-zoned to French schools were always thrilled, of course, and over the 1980's more and more English-speaking families moved West to Toronto, Calgary and Vancouver. My favorite language law was the one that required store employees to address all customers in French first, even if they overheard the customers speaking English to one another. The Language Police (no, not joking) would send people in to catch disobedient store owners and fine them. All signs on private businesses had to have the French words on them a certain percentage larger than the English words, no matter what community they catered to. A topsy-turvy world, or an Orwellian one - depends on your sense of humor.
This latest news doesn't have much to do with the language laws and the deliberate campaign by the PQ government to drive out English-speaking residents, but it is in the same vein of turning the world upside down for the sake of God-knows-what. The rest of Canada - even given its recent bouts of insanity - is normal in comparison to the PQ.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
1) there's never been any control on what English radio stations can play
2) English schools were- and still are- managed by an English speaking board, and if school closed down, it's because of the dwindling enrollment, not because of government controls
3) there has never been a law that control the language spoken to customers
You're fabulating and propagating hate! For someone who says that she lover "her God", it's certainly not a charitable thing to do!
Nor is it a brave thing to post anonymously on someone else's website, my friend.
If you would like I can spend a few hours doing research (I am a lawyer, I was taught to do that in school) to prove that all this really did happen. All I know is that I did sit in my bedroom in NY in the 1980's and listen to the radio announcers discuss all this repeatedly.
One last thing - please keep your inflammatory and inaccurate language off my comment board. "Propagating hate" is a little thick, don't you think?
The anonymous poster is write.
You should do a little research. Your entire post is filled with false information.
You have every right to disagree with the PQ and Québec's language laws.
But wasting energy fighting fictional laws that only exist in your paranoid imagination? That's beyond Orwellian. That's Alice in Wonderland territory...
your name suits you - I suggest having it tattooed somewhere obvious. I'd get more specific, but this is a family website.
Post a Comment