LETTER

“Bilingual” means Francophones speak both languages to accommodate

 

I was surprised by the letter from Peter A. Ferguson (“I live in a flood zone, but don’t speak French”, May 17, 2017), because what impressed me during the floods was the way the French-speaking volunteers building the dykes bent over backwards to accommodate unilingual Anglophones, often conducting operations in English for their benefit. Of course, Mr Ferguson’s beef is with the Quebec government, which he thinks should be entirely bilingual. His reasoning, that “Canada is a bilingual country”, is an excuse used by many Anglophones who move to Gatineau (motivated by who-knows-what but with no interest in the culture of their neighbours) to justify obliging everyone around them to switch to their second or third language to serve them, be it kids in their first job or, apparently, emergency workers during a crisis. But the “bilingual Canada” excuse is a dishonest one, because those who rely on it know full well that further West and further East, the other provinces are not bilingual. In reality, a “bilingual Canada” means the country has two public languages within its borders, but the provinces are unilingual and you’d be very lucky to be served in your minority language – whether in the public or the private sphere - unless it’s for federal government services “where the numbers warrant”. The one exception is New Brunswick, a little more populous than Laval, and where I suspect “bilingual” is defined in the same way it is in the Outaouais: Francophones speak both languages to accommodate the numerous Anglophones that refuse to speak French.

Of course, here in Aylmer, Francophones are partly to blame for Mr Ferguson’s troubles. It is they who, in their magnanimity, switch to English whenever they so much as hear an English accent, giving people the impression that you can live in Quebec and completely ignore French. That is, until a crisis hits. Then you do want to know how to communicate with your neighbours.

David Ostrosser
Aylmer