the coalition avenir québec (caq) government continues to deliberately deplete its province’s reserves of goodwill between linguistic communities. under bill 96, the caq’s crackdown on people who don’t speak french always and fluently, recent targets of quebec’s “francisation” goons have included a 65-year-old montreal hospital that serves some of the city’s italian-canadian community . it has 472 beds, 103 of which are long-term-care beds, according to the city’s website, and it has long been designated an officially bilingual facility. its official name is hôpital santa cabrini ospedale , in recognition of that status.
it’s not quite clear what bill 96 has done to that status, but it seems to be something meaningful. in preparation for the goons’ visit last week, the montreal gazette reports , the hospital instructed staff always to speak french first to patients.
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last year the quebec office of the french language (o qlf) paid francisation goons to visit jewish general and (ahem) suggest that historical donors’ plaques be translated into french from english and yiddish. that’s absolutely insane. no other jurisdiction i’m aware of in the world does anything like that, unless it’s part of some overtly discriminatory agenda. every nickel of that exercise was empirically wasted.
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and as the oqlf demonstrated in a recent study that the language hawks immediately shredded, burned and flushed the ashes of down the toilet, french isn’t imperilled in quebec to begin with . this is all just a majoritarian adventure to crack down on people who didn’t grow up speaking french, largely in retribution for them not having voted for sovereignty 30 years ago.
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in other bilingualism news, journalist dean beeby reports that federal official languages commissioner raymond théberge has launched an investigation into the cbc proactively posting online its responses to journalists’ access-to-information requests.
that time is not now. this is a broke and broken country, requiring generations of punishingly expensive fixing — not least on the most basic issue of housing — that actually made a controversy out of children’s medicine delivered to quebec, during a children’s medicine shortage , on grounds the labels weren’t bilingual.
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cselley@postmedia.com