Michel Rochette, president of the Quebec branch of the Retail Council of Canada, sees the Biden administration’s message as a "signal’’ couched in diplomatic language.
Michel Rochette, president of the Quebec branch of the Retail Council of Canada, sees the Biden administration’s message as a "signal’’ couched in diplomatic language.
But it doesn’t. Everywhere I turned in Ontario as an immigrant, I was offered bilingual services (in Toronto). No one ever pushed either language on me specifically. It was just stated to know one or the other. Even my first work place in Toronto had accommodated people that spoke French only.
While I know that in reality corpos are okay with conversing in English in Quebec, the government sure as hell don’t like it. And their reasoning for implementing the laws is nothing more than racism, xenophobia and to fuck with the “anglos” (whoever those might be, but I suspect it’s basically everyone that has no French-Quebecois ancestry).
I appreciate your anecdotal evidence, but it remains anecdotal. I could go on about my own anecdotes living in a province which, on paper is officially bilingual, but where I struggle to receive services in French. Even workplaces in Francophone-majority areas barely accommodate unilingual French speakers. I suspect your experience is far from the norm.
Look, I won’t pretend racism and xenophobia aren’t issues in Québecois society, they are and that deserves to be addressed. Anyone who says otherwise is a fool. What I take issue with is equating any and all measures to protect the French language with racism and xenophobia. Are the methods the current CAQ government using to supposedly “protect French” often steeped in racism and xenophobia? I definitely think they are. But the concept of French preservation is much larger than the CAQ’s definition of it. Québecois.es have not too distant memories of being second-class citizens under a rich Anglophone elite, I think anyone should understand why they would be apprehensive at multinational business interests entering the province and not giving any fucks about French.