By Kim McConnell, Dec. 23, 2009
The situation in Pakenham is the line that is being drawn in the sand – people are starting to understand the onerous burden of Official Bilingualism – a policy that was designed to push the French language onto English-speaking Canada to the exclusion of ALL common sense.
Only when people are directly, adversely affected do they really understand why we’re fighting so hard against this failed policy which has been proven to be a gargantuan failure, extremely discriminatory against English-speakers, resulting in a less than productive public service because jobs are awarded not on merit but on linguistic prowess and is extremely expensive to boot.
According to Jim Allan:
Per our Canadian Census statistics in 1986, only 16.86% of Canadians were bilingual at that time [self assessed, English and French].
In 2006, 20 years later, only 17.44% of Canadians were bilingual [self assessed, English and French]. That is a 0.58% improvement (just over half of one percent) for an estimated cost by me of $1,169 trillion Canadian, over 20 years.
That is a quote from Jim Allan, a retired CA in Toronto who has used his mathematical skills to estimate the cost of OB, basing his calculations on known Treasury Board figures.
Al Lunney, Mayor of Mississippi Township & Deny Ferguson, councilor for Pakenham, said the council is looking into the idea of moving the Pakenham Post Office a few kilometres away, so that it’s no longer geographically within the National Capital Region. “We’ve got pages and pages of legalese to go through, but we’ve got a lot of fight in us yet -- we’re from Pakenham,” said Ferguson.
To us, this is just a temporary solution to the much bigger problem of being forced to adhere to a policy that will eventually lead to the untenable situation of the English-speaking majority being governed by a French-speaking minority. This is happening all around us but it is still amazing how ill-informed the average Canadian is about why we should either change the OLA drastically or scrap it altogether.
The biggest obstacle to finding an acceptable solution to this problem is that MOST Canadians are still afraid to speak up – either because their jobs are in jeopardy if they do or they are not directly affected so “it’s not MY problem”.
The problem will affect all of us eventually – being relegated to 2nd class status is in itself not acceptable and the situation right now is that unless you’re bilingual, you don’t deserve to be treated like a 1st class citizen.
According to Michael Ignatieff, being bilingual is the essence of being Canadian: http://thereview.on.ca/topstory179.php
We are in the process of getting a recording of the last two days’ shows on CFRA – please ask if you would like to get this file. It will please those of our readers who are interested in being witness to the start of a revolution – people are speaking up & the snowball has been sent on its trip down the hill. 2010 will be a good year!!
Kim McConnell
| Canadians for Language Fairness P.O. Box 40111 Bank & Hunt Club Postal Outlet 2515 Bank Street Ottawa, ON, K1V 0W8 Tel (613) 321-7333 Website: www.languagefairness.ca Email: clf1@bell.net |
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