“The Trouble with Canada….still”

Author William Gairdner interviewed by Mark Sutcliffe of CFRA

Canadians for Language Fairness, December 28, 2010

By Kim McConnell

It still puzzles me why most Canadians are still not aware of the reasons for Canada being such an unhappy country – there are so many problems and none of them are easy to solve. 

Listen to this interview by CFRA’s Mark Sutcliffe and send your comments to William Gairdner at wgairdner@gmail.com

Those of us who have been paying attention will agree with Mr. Gairdner’s list of problems.  I mention here just a partial list:

 

• Welfare Statism
• Canada’s Health-care
• The Criminal Justice System
• Multiculturalism, Immigration and Terrorism
• Trudeau’s Charter

My focus is on Chapter 14 entitled, French-Fried – Official Bilingualism, Separatism and the Politics of Language & Culture.  He gives a complete history of how this is the result of the attempt to turn Canada into a socialist state. 

“The crucial national factor in this story was that Canada’s history of blandishments to French Canadians, once in the hands of the master politician Pierre Trudeau, became a key tool in the creation of his dream:  a more socialist nation, from sea to sea, along French rationalist lines…..What Trudeau’s Charter would eventually achieve legally, his 1969 OLA achieved culturally.  But his game plan went unnoticed by most English Canadians, who still see the learning of French simply as a fine (even a snobbish) cultural achievement.  Of course, learning any additional language is indeed a fine achievement.  But Trudeau’s official bilingualism was not primarily about language.  It was about national political power and unity.  What Trudeau wanted most---disliking intensely what he considered irrational English-style checkerboard federalism in general, and free-market capitalism in particular--- was a strong socialist nation governed by uniform national regulations, standards, and funding, coast to coast.”

The paragraph on the cost of Official Bilingualism ended in this sentence:

“Federally at least, Canada would today be a debt-free nation”

if not for the mandated spending on bilingualism by the public and private sectors over the past 40 years. 

There is so much that I could quote from Mr. Gairdner’s book but I will be selective.

“So here’s the picture:  we have a situation in which full and free language rights have been legally suppressed for English speakers living in Quebec, at the same time as all other Canadians are being told their public and commercial world must by law become increasingly bilingual.  The result is that since the 1970s unilingual Canadians have had a much harder time gaining public or private employment wherever bilingualism is required.  The government of Canada is our largest employer by far, and as we have seen, offers very cushy jobs with wages above the private sector equivalent with dream pensions.  But as journalist Richard Gwyn puts it, those in the majority were destined “to be disadvantaged in life, through no fault of their own…The central inescapable fact of bilingualism [is] clear: it mean[s] loss of power for unilingual English Canadians.”

Gairdner also quotes from Peter Brimelow:

“they [unilingual Anglophones] constitute an improbably large bloc…to be permanently reduced to the status of second-class citizens”.

He continues:

“That the children of the majority should be required to bear the brunt of acculturation, particularly when their language is that of the entire continent, is a measure of the extent to which the [French] minority has the moral [and political] initiative in Canada”

My particular interest is in his final paragraph, “What’s Next?” 

“Canada must return to a condition of true federalism….means a return to our original pre-Trudeau decentralization:  more or less a sovereign nation of sovereign provinces, the central government and the provinces each with well-defined rights and obligations according to general or local matters, accordingly.  That is exactly what Canada’s original Constitution – the 1867 BNA Act—prescribed.  That was our founding British vision”

“But to return to the vision of our founders, to that original freedom and independence from all-pervasive Statism, we would need to scrap the Charter, return to our Common Law roots, stop all socialist transfer payments to provinces (and regions); live within our means both provincially and nationally, withdraw central government from all provinces in all areas from which the general government is barred by the BNA Act.  Then Quebec, like every other province, could live in peace and tolerably run its own affairs.  Quebec could continue as a French-style welfare state within Canada all on its own but without taking money from the rest of us to do that.”

Now who can disagree with that?

Kim

Un tete-a-tete

 

… Quebec's workplace health and safety board had deleted its "Press 9 for English" option on its automated telephone answering service.

National Post, December 11, 2010

By Kathryn Blaze Carlson

In its 40 years of existence, official bilingualism in Canada has been conferred a sort of religious mystique--heralded as a unifying force, accepted as an untouchable sacred cow, and decried a decade ago by the current prime minister as the "god that failed."

And yet, for a policy that riles nationalist sentiment -- and costs the federal government upward of $1.8-billion annually, according to a Fraser Institute report -- official bilingualism is the elephant in the room: Few federal politicians have dared to deal with its weight, which over the decades has crushed those who challenge Canada's linguistic duality or the way it is implemented.

Nevertheless, there are those who now ask: Is it time for a frank conversation on bilingualism in Canada, where 40% of federal public-service positions require knowledge of both official languages? Is it time for Canadians, whose rate of bilingualism has hovered at roughly 17% for years, to take a hard look at the way the government administers language policy from sea to sea to sea?

Is it time to examine the $1.8-billion annual bill to see what, exactly, those taxpayer dollars glean -- especially at a time when one in five Canadians are foreign-born, and are likely to speak a number of other international languages?

More importantly, is this kind of national discussion welcomed, or even possible?

"If we're spending as much as we seem to be spending, and if we're getting as poor a result as we appear to be getting, then maybe we should reconsider the whole thing," said Link Byfield, former publisher of the now-defunct Alberta Report and a Wildrose Alliance party founder and candidate.

"It may be that the time has come to review the application of the Official Languages Act to see if there can be some savings," echoed Donald Savoie, a Moncton, N.B., scholar who says he firmly supports linguistic duality. "It's a sacred cow, but that doesn't mean that it should be a sacred budget."

In the past eight days alone, Canadians have on four occasions been reminded of the cost and contentious nature of Canada's linguistic duality: First, the B.C. RCMP announced that the publication of online news releases would be delayed by a day to allow for French translation - in a province where 1.5% of the population declares French as their mother tongue, and where Chinese and Punjabi are heard far more often.

Second, it was revealed that language-training expenses at the Treasury Board Secretariat have jumped five-fold in the past five years, from $428,490 to $2.1-million in the latest fiscal year. Next, news broke that Quebec's workplace health and safety board had deleted its "Press 9 for English" option on its automated telephone answering service.

Finally, the Senate (for the 15th time) hotly debated a bill that would require Supreme Court judges to be fluently bilingual. The controversial bill has already passed third reading in the House of Commons -- proof, some have argued, that official bilingualism is almighty, trumping even legal competency.

Official language rights are entrenched in Canadian legislation that dates as far back as the Constitution Act of 1867, but which are most famously outlined in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and then prime minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau's 1969 Official Languages Act.

"In all parts of the country, within both language groups, there are those who call for uniformity," Mr. Trudeau told the House of Commons in 1968, before the act was enshrined. "It will be simpler and cheaper, they argue. In the case of the French minority, isolation is prescribed as necessary for survival."

Today, naysayers still question whether the cost of official bilingualism fits the benefits.

"The federal government's approach to official bilingualism is kind of like this: They want to paint one object, but they line up 10 and they throw a bucket of paint at them all," said Kevin Gaudet, federal director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation. "Of course they end up painting the one bucket, but you also end up painting the other nine. It's overkill."

Mr. Gaudet questions whether federal offices should be forced to offer both French and English in areas where the linguistic minority comprises as little as 5% of the population, as mandated by the Official Languages Act.

The government is also obliged to offer services in both official languages at all departmental headquarters, as well as to the traveling public, for example at border crossings or at airports that serve more than one million passengers annually.

"Something like 15% of the population [speaks French], and some small subset of that number doesn't even speak any English," Mr. Gaudet said. "And yet the thought is, 'Let's spend billions and billions every year for fear that one of those people could trip into an office in Meadow Lake, Sask., and be upset because they couldn't get a government service' " in their mother tongue.

Also among the most hot-button issues is the makeup of the federal public service, where 40% of positions require knowledge of both official languages. About a third of all federal offices are required to offer services in both official languages.

"Services to the public are the face of Canada saying to Canadians, 'This is your country,' " said Graham Fraser, the Official Languages Commissioner of Canada, who was reached this week in Spain after attending a UNESCO conference in Egypt.

Over the past decade, Ottawa has imposed stricter bilingualism requirements on senior public servants: Incumbent executives in designated bilingual regions had to improve their language skills to reach an advanced level of bilingualism, and deputy ministers were required to reach proficiency in French and English.

Some argue that those sorts of language requirements unfairly squeeze out anglophone Canadians, particularly in the West, who seek to rise in the federal public service. They argue that this in turn perpetuates resentment of Ottawa by the West, which decreasingly sees itself reflected in the federal government.

And then there is the cost of language training: Across the country, unilingual employees striving for a promotion can seek approval from their manager to leave their post for months on end to learn French or English at the expense of Canadian taxpayers.

Recently, though, individual departments took over responsibility for language training, and their budgets dictate a tighter leash on those taxpayer dollars, Mr. Fraser said. When asked whether any federal dollars have been wasted or misspent on official bilingualism, Mr. Fraser said "yes," and said he believes the training program "got misused."

It is all but impossible to know exactly how much the federal and provincial governments spend ensuring official bilingualism in Canada. But one of the firmest federal numbers yet emerged last year, when a Fraser Institute study found that the federal government and its Crown corporations spend somewhere in the order of $1.8-billion annually providing French-language services. That amounts to $55 per Canadian.

Mr. Fraser said he does not "challenge nor vouch for" those numbers, and added that it is "not an unreasonable price to pay for what is basically the cost of equality."

The $1.8-billion price-tag includes the cost of an $800 bilingualism bonus paid to federal employees who occupy a bilingual position and meet the language requirements. That amounts to $51-million in bonuses per year-- an amount Mr. Fraser called "an inappropriate use of public funds."

In fact, as was pointed out by Mr. Trudeau in the House of Commons, a salary differential has been paid since 1966 to those holding secretarial, stenographic and typist positions in which both languages are used.

"My predecessor - and my predecessor's predecessor - stopped beating this horse because it's part of the collective bargaining process," Mr. Fraser said of the bilingualism bonus. "Any time I have raised it, people have said, 'Don't go near that.' "

Mr. Byfield said it is precisely this "don't go near that" mentality that has stalled official languages policy in Canada.

"When you see the number that says about 20% of Canadians are now foreign-born, the old sort of 1960s bicultural, binational delusion is seen for what it is," he said. ''There has to be something of a national discussion on this.... But it's hard to do this if you can't talk about it in Parliament, and you can't."

Indeed, even musing on official bilingualism -- and even doing so outside of Parliament -- draws fire upon politicians.

Conservative MP Scott Reid, author of Lament for a Notion: The Life and Death of Canada's Bilingual Dream, suggested in 2004 that it might be time to reconsider offering bilingual services coast to coast, in turn forcing Conservative leader Stephen Harper to launch into damage control.

"People have different views on different criteria for service or language of work, but the fundamentals are things we support," Mr. Harper told reporters in Winnipeg at the time. Just three years prior, Mr. Harper wrote in a Calgary newspaper column that, "as a religion, bilingualism is the god that failed. It has led to no fairness, produced no unity, and cost Canadian taxpayers untold millions."

Prof. Savoie, of the Universite de Moncton, said that is not the case in New Brunswick, and said Ottawa could learn from the experiences of Canada's only officially bilingual province.

"First, one has to be patient -- you do not create a bilingual nation overnight," he said from Moncton, the country's first officially bilingual city. "Second, it takes a fair bit of good will, especially as we see governments struggling with some pretty stubborn deficits. There will be pressure to cut or tone down bilingualism, but I would urge caution."

New Brunswick's Official Languages Act is up for review in 2012, after it was declared in 2002 that the act would be revisited each decade. Mr. Savoie said the federal government should take up this 10-year review model, although he conceded that it will take a "fair bit of courage to launch a review."

Mr. Byfield, of the Wildrose Alliance, said "the government cannot touch this under the current parliamentary system," because national parties depend too heavily on support from both French and English speaking Canada. The only thing that would open the door for a political discussion, he said, would be via a provincially elected Senate.

"Until you can talk about official bilingualism in Parliament, I don't think much can happen," he said.

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THE SHIFT AWAY FROM FRENCH

As the proportion of francophones declines in Canada, other languages are increasingly heard in major cities across the country - marking a significant shift in the nation's linguistic landscape.

The 2006 census was telling, and showed that francophones are making up a smaller and smaller proportion of Canada's population: 22.1% of Canada's population reported French as their mother tongue, as compared with 22.9% in 2001. And within Quebec, the francophone population had dipped to 79.6%, marking the first time in 75 years that francophones comprised less than 80% of the population in that province.

Indeed, in many Canadian cities, French is being outpaced by other languages, namely Chinese, Italian, German, Punjabi and Spanish -- all of which have risen in use across the country over the past three decades. About 38% of those in Vancouver report Chinese as their mother tongue, and 8.8% of Torontonians say Italian is their language of choice. There, only 1.7% of the population is francophone.

"I think schools should start to encourage the acquisition of English, French, as well as other global languages," said Fred Genesee, a Canadian expert in second-language learning, adding that the European Union is on track with its own "2+1" language approach. "For those who are a bit lukewarm on bilingualism because they're soured by the nationalism debate, it might be beneficial to conceptualize bilingualism within the idea of preparing our children for a global village."

In fact, there are already those who argue that Canada's linguistic duality drives economic development -- whether via trade, tourism or services offered.

"Come to Moncton, look at the number of jobs that have been created by bilingualism," said Donald Savoie, who holds a Canada Research Chair in public administration and governance at the Universite de Moncton. "There are call centres and businesses in Moncton that service French-speakers in Quebec and France, for example."

Beyond that, Mr. Savoie said, official bilingualism holds an intangible value, as linguistic duality is "part of Canada, it's part of who we are."

He said New Brunswick -- Canada's only officially bilingual province -- has come a long way, offering hope to Canadians who question whether the nation is, after all these years, still headed down the right path.

"I'm of the vintage that remembers Leonard Jones," he said, referring to Moncton's anti-bilingualism mayor. "I remember, on the streets of Moncton, people saying 'Speak white.' You don't hear that any more."

Source: Kathryn Blaze Carlson, National Post

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BY THE NUMBERS

• 24 in millions, approximate number of Canadians likely to interact with the federal government in English
• 7 in millions, approximate number of Canadians likely to interact with the federal government in French
• 6 in millions, approximate number of foreign-born people in Canada
• 4 in millions, approximate number of unilingual francophones in Canada
• 3.9 in million, approximate number of unilingual francophones in Quebec
• 38 as a percentage, Vancouverites who report Chinese as their mother tongue
• 17 as a percentage, Canadians who consider themselves bilingual
• 40 as a percentage, federal public-sector jobs that require knowledge of both official languages
• 33 as a percentage, federal offices that are required to offer services in both official languages
• 1.8 in billions of federal dollars, estimated cost to provide French-language services in Canada in 2006
• 55 in dollars, per capita cost spent federally on official bilingualism in 2006

Sources: Statistics Canada, Fraser Institute report titled Official Language Policies at the Federal Level in Canada

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nationalpost.com/todays-paper/TETE+TETE/3962187/story.html

Supreme Court of Canada remains intact

National Post, December 10, 2010

By Lorne Gunter,

Thank God for the Senate and its willingness to thwart Bill C-232.

It would be far better if the Senate were elected. Then this would be a case of one elected body overturning the will of another. There would be more democratic legitimacy to the move.

Nonetheless, the Senate should be praised for being willing to stop the House of Commons in its attempt to bring in a disastrous, divisive new piece of legislation that would require all future appointees to the Supreme Court to be fluently bilingual -- and not just fluent in conversational French and English, but fluent in the vocabulary of both our Common and Civil law traditions.

The bill, supported by the Liberals, News Democrats and Bloc, would require all future appointees to our highest court to be able to hear cases without the aid of simultaneous translation. Future justices would have to have an understanding of both English and French legalese nearly equal to that of the professional translators currently employed by the Supreme Court.

It is a ridiculous requirement that would limit the pool of potential justices to a few hundred legal scholars and lower-court justices. It would place language competence above legal knowledge as a prerequisite for sitting on the court and, more disturbing still, it would have the effect of limiting selection to a tiny geographic area -- the so-called "bilingual belt" from Ottawa, through Montreal and Quebec City, to Moncton. Outside that region, few lawyers or judges posses the linguistic requirements to sit on the court that decides important Charter cases and sets the precedents that directs Canada's legal life.

If the bill has teeth, few future justices would come from outside of Quebec, the capital region or northern New Brunswick.

Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff's response to this criticism is that ambitious lawyers and judges could take the time to learn both official languages. But once again, this puts language skills ahead of legal ones. Not only that, it would give a huge advantage to judges and lawyers who live and work in those few regions of the country where both languages are commonly spoke. It is not enough to take classes in another language if one wishes to become fluent, one must also use the new language on an almost daily basis, which is next to impossible outside the bilingual belt.

lgunter@shaw.ca

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Read more: nationalpost.com/todays-paper/Power+periphery/3956077/story.html#ixzz17kY80Kq4

Fiscal crunch? Oh hum

Canada, especially Quebec, faces fiscal crunch in coming decades: study

The Canadian Press, November 18, 2010

By Ross Marowits

MONTREAL - Canada faces a fiscal crisis and the first province to hit the wall will be Quebec, a new report warned Thursday.

The province's heavy debt burden, weak demographic growth and high health-care spending put pressure on it to be the first to make difficult decisions, says the Conference Board of Canada report.

Quebec's fiscal pressures are so severe that, within 20 years, sales taxes there would need to double if the province tried to balance the budget that way alone, the report notes.

The province's debt already equals 47 per cent of its economic output. Combined with its share of the federal debt, that number rises to a debilitating 80 per cent.

Glen Hodgson, the board's chief economist, says that puts Quebec around the same worrisome category as the United States, which, although still far better off than Greece's 110 per cent level, could see debt seriously limit its public spending options.

The report says current trends point to the provincial deficit ballooning to $45 billion by 2030, as health-care spending more than triples to $90 billion over the next two decades.

Health care's claim on overall Quebec government revenues would grow, from 43.1 per cent in 2009-2010, to 63.4 per cent in 2030-2031.

"(Quebec) really is the poster child, unfortunately, for the kind of changes that are going to have to happen," Hodgson said.

Although its report focuses exclusively on Quebec, the conference board announced it will create a new body to track health spending in various provinces.

"We think that health care is one of those issues that has been asleep for the last few years," Hodgson said.

"It is now time to wake it up again and have an honest national dialogue about the sustainability of our health-care systems."

Quebec Finance Minister Raymond Bachand downplayed the report, calling it incomplete.

"In fact, this report does not take into account all the courageous choices made by the government in the last budget," he said in a statement.

Program spending growth will be capped at 2.9 per cent this year and 2.2 per cent thereafter.

"Our plan to restore fiscal balance includes all measures necessary to restore fiscal balance in 2013-2014. Unfortunately, the study did not take all those into consideration."

Bachand said the province will also reduce the debt by setting higher electricity rates as of 2014 which, he claimed, the study does not take into account.

The conference board is creating a new group called the Canadian Alliance for Sustainable Health Care to conduct analyses of other provinces.

It warns that Quebec isn't alone but may be more ready for the debate than many provinces because it put in place a tough budget last spring and made hard decisions including raising the sales tax by two percentage points by January 2012.

While Hodgson doesn't believe the government will succeed in balancing the budget in four years, it was a starting point.

Said Hodgson, the Ontario government, by comparison, "punted" the tough choices until after next year's provincial election.

In the report titled, "Quebec's Fiscal Situation: The Alarm Bells Have Sounded," the conference board said Quebec's revenue growth will be limited to four per cent a year and its population will grow by 0.7 per cent.

Meanwhile, spending is forecast to grow 5.1 per cent per year and Quebec's real economic growth should be 1.6 per cent per year through 2030-2031.

If Quebec's taxation rates and historical trends in actual per-capita program spending are maintained, the budget becomes unsustainable, warned Mario Lefebvre, the board's director of Quebec affairs.

"The status quo is no longer an option. There are difficult choices to make," he told a news conference.

The Conference Board didn't prescribe any specific solutions but said the room to manoeuvre will lessen if painful decisions are put off for several years.

Lefebvre said Quebec's population has to decide how it wants to close the financial gap.

"If we want to maintain universal health care, it's a totally justifiable and honourable choice, but you just have to know that there is a cost."

Politicians would need to raise the provincial sales tax to 19.5 per cent to balance the budget in 20 years, assuming the current rate of growth in federal transfers and the projected growth in health spending.

While the report's authors said they weren't pointing fingers at specific government decisions, Parti Quebecois finance critic Nicolas Marceau said the Conference Board doesn't believe the government can control its spending.

He said it's time for the finance minister "tells the truth to Quebecers" about the real state of public finances.

Bachand plans to present his economic update before the end of November.

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winnipegfreepress.com/breakingnews/conference-board-of-canada-says-fiscal-health-of-quebec-is-at-risk-without-reform-108961254.html

Quebec nationalism still at war – with itself

Mr. Separatist Hero couldn’t turn on the lights in his party’s office without the generosity of Joe and Jane Canadian.

National Post, editorial, November 2, 2010

If it is possible, Quebec nationalism is becoming even more intellectually inconsistent. It has always attempted to sell its followers on its ability to achieve two diametrically opposed outcomes at the same time - insisting that it can win Quebec freedom from Ottawa's control, while at the same time maintaining Quebec's transfers and other subsidies from Canadian taxpayers. That, in a nutshell, is what "sovereignty association" has always been about.

Monday, 50 young Parti Quebecois (PQ) members published an open letter in the separatist-leaning Montreal newspaper, Le Devoir, calling on party leader Pauline Marois to push harder and faster for separation at a time when fewer Quebecers favour breaking away from Canada than at any time in the past generation.

In the background of this current PQ schism is an implicit threat: Cater to the aspirations of the party's hardcore nationalists or they will entice Bloc Quebecois Leader Gilles Duceppe to leave federal politics and come back to Quebec to replace Ms. Marois, who, by the way, does not want to give up her post.

Mr. Duceppe is the most popular active political leader in the province -- federal or provincial -- and sovereigntists cling to the hope that he could revive momentum for their movement, which since its narrow loss in the 1995 referendum has never come as close again to fulfilling its dream of an independent Quebec.

The irony is that Mr. Duceppe and his federal BQ party are at one and the same time the most disloyal party in Ottawa and the party most dependent on federal taxpayers.

The BQ have time and again made it clear they are ready and willing to tear Canada apart. Mr. Duceppe is a sovereigntist folk hero because he has never wavered from his belief that "Canadian federalism can never be changed to accommodate Quebec," unlike Ms. Marois who has, since becoming PQ leader in 2007, toned down her separatist rhetoric. She now proposes shelving a third referendum while seeking new powers from Ottawa.

Duceppe's stated commitment to separation was always why the proposed 2008 coalition between the Liberals and NDP was such a dangerous idea. It would have had to be held in place by a man and a party determined to exploit the first opportunity to ruin the nation.

While the Tories rely for about 40% of their funding on taxpayer subsidies, the NDP 60% and the Liberals 70%, the Bloc does almost no independent fundraising. Its annual political budget derives over 90% of its revenues from the $2-per-vote grant registered parties receive from taxpaying Canadians. 

Mr. Separatist Hero would be unable to turn on the lights in his party's offices were it not for the generosity of Joe and Jane Canadian.

The philosophic confusion among sovereigntists is also apparent in their revulsion for Ms. Marois's go-slow approach. It is nothing more or less than Lucien Bouchard's "winning conditions" strategy. Mr. Bouchard remains the most popular figure in Quebec, even among sovereigntists. Yet during his tenure as premier -- when momentum for sovereignty remained high -- he was never able to arrange another vote on separation because he could never find a time when the stars lined up for a win. Ms. Marois is merely confronting the same reality faced by the lauded Mr. Bouchard. Yet, the knives are out for her.

Still, none of this is new for sovereigntists. Their inconsistency is their most consistent trait.

When Brian Mulroney was prime minister, for instance, the Quebec wing of his caucus dictated that half of all defence spending had to occur in Quebec. During the Canada Round of constitutional negotiations in the early 1990s, there were demands from Quebec that part of the National Archives and other national museums be given to Quebec, should it decide to leave. Nationalists insisted all of Air Canada and any other federal asset residing in the province would belong to an independent Quebec, but not part of Canada's national debt.

Jacques Parizeau even had some unusual calculations during the 1995 referendum about how Quebec was bleeding money every year to the rest of Canada, despite being by far the largest recipient of transfers and equalization.

The current PQ troubles are nothing new. Quebec nationalism has been an idea at war with itself for 40 years.

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Read more: nationalpost.com/todays-paper/Quebec+nationalism+still+with+itself/3761650/story.html#ixzz14AH9i1F8

Quebec chooses language over common sense

 

“Coercive language laws are counter-productive to a state’s prosperity. Governed by emotion, not reason, (Quebec’s) laws have the effect of driving away the most entrepreneurial residents.”

National Post, October 27, 2010

By Barbara Kay

During my last round of buffing at the Montreal aesthetics salon that I frequent, I enjoyed an interesting exchange with “Alia,” a lovely young woman of South Asian ancestry who threads ladies’ eyebrows for an embarrassing pittance.

Alia and her husband immigrated here three years ago. Their two-year old son is enrolled in one of Quebec’s famously cheap daycare programs. Alia’s husband is a messenger by day and a pizza deliveryman by night. In good functional English that she learned in Bangladesh, Alia outlined their long-range plan to me. They will stay in Montreal until their son finishes elementary school. Then, with her parents who are awaiting their green light to come here, “We will move to Calgary or Edmonton and open a 24-hour handy store.”

Why Alberta? Alia is happy to have her child educated in French for now, as is required under Quebec law. But if they expect to maximize his opportunities for success — and that was the whole point of their emigrating, and being prepared to work around the clock en famille in a store — he would have to learn how to read, speak and write high-level English.

Quebec’s loss, Alberta’s gain, all because Quebec forces Alia’s son to be schooled in French.

Today, in great swathes of the world, English unilingualism is no impediment to steady career advancement, whereas even tri- or quatri-lingualism — if none of the languages is English — is of little use for advancement. Furthermore, unilingualism in any language but English (that includes you, French) is the kiss of death to private-sector career advancement.

As we learn from Robert McCrum’s new book, Globish, excerpted in the Post last month, global English is the “world’s language.” A quarter of the world’s population speaks English with more or less proficiency. Resistance to its economic hegemony and institutional usefulness is futile. Indeed, apart from Quebec, there are few (any?) places in the world even trying to resist that reality.

Coercive language laws are counter-productive to a state’s prosperity. Governed by emotion, not reason, such laws have the effect of driving away the most entrepreneurial residents — not just ambitious immigrants like Alia and her family, but native sons and daughters too.

Local languages are culturally enriching and provide dazzling social capital amongst our cultural elites, but are most useful career-wise in bureaucratic linguistic hothouses (e.g., Quebec’s bloated civil service) where symbols of cultural equality trump reality. In the real world of the marketplace, English rules.

And where prosperity, not culture-worship, is the goal of a state’s government, reason prevails with a vengeance. According to a 2008 report by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, an astonishing 96%-100% of those polled in China, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea and Vietnam said it was important for their children to learn English. Even former colonies aren’t throwing out the baby with the bathwater. India was happy to see the back of the Brits, but learning English remained an obsession (India’s 1951 constitution was written in English). In May 2010, a temple in the state of Uttar Pradesh was dedicated to “Goddess English.”

Most people speak English out of self-interest, but those who love their native language won’t abandon it if both languages are taught side by side. In Bangladesh, the official, and fiercely loved Bangla language co-exists in harmony with English, that country’s valued, widespread and widely relied-upon second language. Likewise with Hebrew and English in Israel.

It’s time Quebec stopped cutting off its nose to spite its face. Colonialism was then, Globish is now. Admit it, accept it, and embrace it. If a language isn’t loved enough by native speakers to flourish, and can only be saved through the linguistic dhimmitude of others, it isn’t a language worth saving.

bkay@videotron.ca

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Read more: fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2010/10/27/barbara-kay-quebec-chooses-language-over-self-interest/#ixzz13hB9rlN6

Quebec and the Fairy Godmothers

Calgary Herald
By Licia Corbella

Today, let's have some fun and play Fairy Godmother to Quebec. Let's grant the province the wish it articulated in Copenhagen. Wave the magic wand and poof, wish granted. Shut down Alberta's oilsands, except, since it’s Quebec making the wish, we have to call it tarsands, even though it's not tar they use to run their Bombardier planes, trains and Skidoos.

Ah, at last! The blight on Canada's reputation shut down. All those dastardly workers from across Canada living in Fort McMurray, Calgary and Edmonton out of jobs, including those waitresses, truck drivers, nurses, teachers, doctors, pilots, engineers etc. They can all go on Employment insurance like Ontario autoworkers and Quebec parts makers!

Closing down Alberta's oil industry would immediately stop the production of 1.8 million barrels of oil a day. Supply and demand being what it is, oil prices will go up and therefore the cost at the pump will go up, too, increasing the cost of everything else.

But lost jobs in Alberta and across the country along with higher gas prices are a small price to pay to save the world and not "embarrass" Quebecers on the world stage. Not to worry though, Saudi Arabia, Libya and Nigeria can come to the rescue. You know, the guys who pump money into al-Qaida and help Osama bin Laden target those Van Doos fighting in Afghanistan. Bloody oil is so much nicer than dirty tarsands oil.

Shutting down the oilsands will reduce Canada's greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 38.4 Mt (megatonnes). Hooray! It's so much fun to be a Fairy Godmother! While that sounds like a lot, Canada only produces two per cent of the world's man-made GHGs and the oilsands only produce five per cent of Canada's total emissions or 0.1 per cent of the world's emissions. By comparison, the U.S. Produces 20.2 per cent of the world's GHG emissions, 27 per cent of which comes from coal-fired electricity.

The 530-square-kilometre piece of land currently disturbed by the oilsands (which is smaller than the John F. Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Fla. At 570 square kilometres) must be reclaimed by law and will return to Alberta's 381,000 square kilometres of boreal forest, a huge carbon sink.

Quebec, of course, has clean hydro power, but more than 13,000 square kilometres were drowned for the James Bay hydroelectric project, permanently removing that forest from acting as a carbon sink.

But Fairy Godmother is digressing all over the place. While the oilsands only produce five per cent of Canada's GHGs, it contributes much more to Canada's economy. After all, oil and gas make up one-quarter of the value on the TSX alone. Alberta is also the largest net contributor per capita by far to Confederation and there are only two more -- B.C. And Ontario.

Quebec hasn't made a net contribution to the rest of Canada for a very long time. This is not to be critical (after all, Fairy Godmothers never criticize), it's just a fact. In 2009, Albertans paid $40.46 billion in income, corporate and other taxes to the federal government and received back just $19.35 billion in services and goods from the feds. That means the rest of Canada got $21.1 billion from Albertans or $5,742 for each and every Alberta man, woman and child. In 2007 (the last year national figures are available), Alberta sent a net contribution of $19.49 billion to the ROC or $5,553 per Albertan -- more than three times what every Ontarian contributes at $1,757. Quebecers, on the other hand, each received $627 net or a total of $8 billion, money which was designed to help "equalize" social programs across the country. Except, that's not what is happening. Quebec has more generous social programs like (nearly) free university tuition (paid for mostly by Albertans) and cheap provincial day care (paid for mostly by Albertans).

But in this Fairy Godmother world, poof, those delightful unequal programs have now disappeared! Quel dommage!

The July 2009 Canadian Energy Research Institute (CERI) report states that between 2008 and 2032, the oilsands will account for 172,000 person-years of employment in Ontario during the construction phase, plus 640,000 for operations over the 25-year period. For Quebec, the oilsands will account for 84,000 person-years of employment during the construction phase, plus 292,000 for operations over the 25-year period.

In total, the oilsands are expected to add $1.7 trillion to Canada's GDP over the next 25 years.

Wave wand and Poof, Jobs, gone! So, now that the oil industry has shut down and left Alberta, Alberta has become a have-not province and so has every other province. Equality at last! Hugo Chavez will be so pleased.

Meeting our Copenhagen targets suddenly looks possible, as most of us can't afford to drive our cars or buy anything but necessities, so manufacturers have closed their doors and emissions are way down.

The dream of many Quebecers to form their own nation and separate from Canada has died at last. Alas, in Alberta, separatist sentiment has risen dramatically, citizens vote to separate and the oil and gas industry returns.

Albertans start to pocket that almost $6,000 for each person that used to get sent elsewhere and now their kids get free tuition. Fairy Godmother's work is done. Wish granted. Quebecers must now sign up for a foreign worker visas to work in Alberta to send their cheques back home so junior can start saving up to pay for college.

Licia Corbella is editorial page editor of The Calgary Herald.

Bribing Quebec corrupts the whole country

The problem with bribes is they don’t just corrupt the bribee; they corrupt the briber as well.

Ottawa Sun, September 29, 2010

By Lorrie Goldstein, QMI Agency

 

That’s being overlooked in the latest phony, only-in-Canada “controversy” over the Maclean’s cover story describing Quebec as Canada’s most corrupt province.

All the usual suspects in Quebec and Ottawa — provincial and federal politicians of all stripes, both separatist and federalist — predictably have their shorts in a knot over Maclean’s stating what everybody already knows, including inside Quebec.

That is, while there’s corruption in every province, Quebec really is different. That’s because the constant bidding war between federalists and separatists for the affection of Quebecers, using federal tax money, fuels a unique degree of corruption inside Quebec.

But that doesn’t just corrupt Quebec. It corrupts the rest of Canada, too.

Indeed, the most infamous recent case of corruption in Quebec — the “federal” sponsorship scandal — originated in Ottawa.

An idiotic plan by a panic-stricken Jean Chretien to win the loyalty of Quebecers in the wake of the 1995 referendum by buying them a few federalist trinkets with our money, exploded into a scandal in which $100 million of our cash disappeared down the same sinkhole it always does in Quebec, going back decades.

To state the painfully obvious, that constantly trying to buy the loyalty of Quebecers by bribing them to stay in Canada corrupts everyone and everything it touches, is not to insult ordinary Quebecers.

Indeed, they were as infuriated by the sponsorship scandal as the rest of the country, and gutted the federal Liberal party in the ensuing election.

The real disgrace is that our political classes in Ottawa and Quebec constantly attack any mention of the endemic corruption in that province as bigotry, in order to avoid ever having to address it.

Historically, both the federal Liberals and Conservatives (let’s not even get into the provincial parties) have an abysmal history of committing and countenancing corruption in Quebec.

This includes vote-buying, ballot-stuffing, influence-peddling, toll-gating, recruiting party members from graveyards and runaway patronage, to say nothing of turning a blind eye to wholesale corruption inside Quebec’s construction industry.

(That said, recent revelations via a Quebec inquiry that — horrors! — political influence affects who gets appointed as a judge, is hardly a problem confined solely to Quebec.)

While the sponsorship scandal involved actual corruption by federal Liberals, the federal Conservatives under Stephen Harper have corrupted themselves politically by pandering to Quebec — which hasn’t done them any good.

This instead of doing what they said they would do if elected — treat every province equally.

Instead, we get infuriating, pathetic spectacles like eight Conservative MPs donning Nordiques jerseys to show their brainless support for shelling out $175 million of our money for a new hockey arena, so Quebec can get a second NHL team.

That prompted the higher foreheads in the federal Conservative and Liberal parties to say if we’re going to do something that stupid in an era of huge deficits, we’ll have to do it for other provinces, too. Mon Dieu!

That’s another way bribing Quebec corrupts all of Canada, since other provinces are perfectly happy to let Quebec extort whatever it can from the feds, before lining up at the trough to get the same deal for themselves.

In Canada, that’s called taking the high road.

---<>---

lorrie.goldstein@sunmedia.ca

ottawasun.com/comment/columnists/lorrie_goldstein/2010/09/28/15509236.html

Trudeau’s impact is obvious; it’s also mostly bad

 

Pierre Trudeau died 10 years ago this week, so of course the tributes and legacy analyses have been coming thick and fast. Among my favourites was offered up by Chantel Hebert, one of the few people worth reading at the Toronto Star.

National Post, September 29, 2010

By Lorne Gunter

Well, I have one, too. But unlike most commentators, I come to bury Trudeau (or at least make sure he’s still buried), not to praise him.

While he certainly had a profound impact on Canada, it was mostly destructive. Even the few positive changes he made might be called inevitable; they were the type of changes that were coming to every western society by dint of cultural evolution anyway.

Trudeau was by and large a social engineer convinced of his own intellectual superiority and the cloddish unimaginativeness of nearly everyone else.

Not only was he arrogant enough to believe that the natural laws of society and economics can be ignored by determined central planners without consequences, he was also arrogant enough to imagine the light had been given to him more than anyone else, so that he alone possessed the superior knowledge required to see what needed doing and everyone else should defer to him.

Some have argued that legalizing abortion, divorce and homosexuality were bold innovations by Trudeau. Yet nearly every Western nation did the same at around the same time. Trudeau merely ensured Canada was riding the same waves as the rest.

Give him some due. Trudeau faced down the FLQ during the October Crisis of 1970 and a decade later, while much of our chattering class trembled with fear at the prospect of Quebec separation, he shouldered the burden of defeating the sovereigntists in Quebec’s 1980 referendum.

Still, he faced down the separatist terrorists by invoking the War Measures Act and proving just how shallow his vaunted commitment to individual liberties truly was at crunch time. And he won the 1980 referendum at the price of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms — which opened the Pandora’s box of judicial activism — as well as two decades of expensive Quebec appeasement that ended in Adscam.

Of course Adscam came long after Trudeau left office. Still, it was a natural and predictable outcome of throwing gobs and gobs of money at Quebec in an attempt to win the province’s federalist loyalty. When the first money thrown failed to buy Quebec’s love, more and more was thrown until there was so much money being sloshed around at projects of diminishing significance that it was inevitable sticky fingers would grab up some.

While not directly Trudeau’s fault, Adscam was a by-product of his chosen method of fighting Quebec nationalism.

His impact on culture was devastating. He implemented official bilingualism in the vain hope that Quebecers would feel more at home in Canada if they knew the post mistress in Houston, B.C. was fluently bilingual. In the process, though, he failed to placate the Quebecois, but managed to alienate millions of anglophones.

Today, four decades and several billion tax dollars later, we are barely more bilingual as a nation than we were when Trudeau began this social experiment and just as divided (or more so) along linguistic lines.

He imagined that multiculturalism would unify us in our diversity – although he never explained how, practically, that logical non sequitor was supposed to happen. Instead, it has led to divisive ethnopolitics, political correctness dictating national policy, the importation of overseas animosities and the ghettoization of large blocks of new Canadians. Even the inflow of refugee claim jumpers can be traced back to the way that Trudeau thought multiculturalism and easy immigration would make Canada more cosmopolitan.

Human rights commissions are part of his legacy, as was the Court Challenges Program that paid minority plaintiffs to file court cases demanding that they be given Charter rights.

After he left office, Trudeau frequently insisted he had fought for a Charter of Rights to protect individuals from the state, and claimed Court Challenges and the Charter’s provisions authorizing judges to “read in” in rights had both been meant to make that protection easier.

How naive.

Activist judges and activist special interest groups quickly learned they could use one another to advance a radical social remake of Canada, and Ottawa would pay for their court appearances. What was meant to be a shield from the power of the state instead created a cozy little cabal among lefty legal scholars and judges that simply shifted the might of the state from the elected Parliament to the unelected judiciary. Both are, after all, branches of government. So the Charter didn’t protect citizens from the excesses of the state, it merely managed to change the whip from one had to another.

Sure, having politicians vote away our rights is bad, but is it really worse than having overreaching judges do the same? At least the politicians we can vote out of office from time to time. Thanks to the Charter, the new boss is the same as the old boss, only also unreachable by the people.

The CRTC is a Trudeau creation, the people who tell us what we may watch on television and listen on radio.

So, too, is the notion of the CBC as mouthpiece of social and political activism.

But as bad as that litany is, it is probably on the economy that Trudeau was at his worst.

Inflation, national debt, lost opportunities due to protectionism and economic nationalism — all were Trudeau’s legacy. Because he understood so little about economics and entrepreneurship, Trudeau was easily convinced that history would leave capitalism behind and replace it, if not with socialism, then with some form of command-and-control economy.

His reforms to unemployment insurance (now euphemistically renamed Employment Insurance) ensured our labour market would be badly distorted for nearly 30 years. His scheme of regional transfers — that at one time accounted for 40% of have-not provinces revenue — helped freeze poorer regions’ economies in amber and delay the day when their own desperation would lead to innovation and growth.

He presided over the largest expansion of government in our history; from 1974 to 1976, alone, Ottawa’s spending increased by 50%. He believed we could inflate our way out of debt, so never concerned himself with budget deficit, the consequence of which is an enduring national debt (although Conservative prime ministers have helped him out there). And he implemented wage-and-price controls that further damaged the economy they were meant to resurrect.

He even convinced himself it made sense to beggar a productive region — the West – for the enrichment of less productive ones. So he implemented the National Energy Program, which hurt both the economy and national unity.

Trudeau may have been a great theoretician, but if a solution required even a centesimo of practical understanding — and all successful solutions do — he wasn’t interested.

He may have had more impact on Canada than any other 20th century prime minister. Yet on balance, that impact was mostly bad.

Read more: fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2010/09/29/lorne-gunter-trudeaus-impact-is-obvious-its-also-mostly-bad/#ixzz11DkVP7L8

Canada is waking up, finally!

We, the various groups fighting the Official Languages Act, are finally being vindicated by the articles that have been printed over the last few days on the 10th anniversary of P. E. Trudeau’s demise.

October 1, 2010

Lorne Gunter has no qualms about pointing out that Trudeau’s legacy is what has created such a divided country out of the fairly harmonious country of Canada. He referred to all the features of Canadian life that have resulted in great unhappiness across the land – the OLA, Multiculturalism, his Charter of Rights that has led to activist judges and groups, a huge increase in our national debt and a national propensity towards socialism that has destroyed the innate independent nature of Canadians.

What I find most encouraging is the fact that mainstream media is finally coming to the conclusion that Trudeau and his attempts to elevate the position of Quebec & the French fact above the rest of the country is the real reason for the disunity within Canada. It has led to the pandering of ONE province and the vote buying that has resulted in huge sums of money being thrown at that province because they control 75 seats, most held by a homogenous culture of French-speakers whose primary concern is the preservation of the French language & culture. The imbalance thus created, politically, economically, culturally, historically and emotionally explains why there is a general malaise in this country where the English-speaking majority have resigned themselves to a culture of defeat.

However, we are not defeated yet – not while we have people who continue to pay attention, to speak up & protest and, with the help of an awakening media, spread the word!!!

I have included the links to the other columnists on this topic – if you have the time to read their opinions (some for & some against), please do so. There was a very interesting discussion on CFRA this morning between John Robson (History professor at the U. of Ottawa) and Steve Madely about the legacy of Britain (the Magna Carta) and how this has laid the foundation for our concept of Freedom. If you have the time to listen, I’ll include the link at the bottom.

Kim

NB Francophones plot to increase French language usage

"The Official Languages Act of 2002 has led to major advances in the language employed by municipalities, police, health services, in terms of creating the post of Commissioner of Official Languages.”

The English in New Brunswick have to defend their language rights out of their own pockets, while the French take our taxes to expand French language usage.

Translated from a French New Brunswick newspaper:-

Three groups of Francophone Acadians have been invited to participate in the review of the Official Languages Act of New Brunswick, which must occur by December 31, 2012.  A symposium will be held for this purpose on 19 and 20 November organized by the Association of French Speaking Jurists of New Brunswick (AJEFNB), the International Observatory of Linguistic Rights of the Faculty of Law at the University of Moncton and the Acadian Society of New Brunswick (ASNB) and the timing directly links to the provincial election campaign that officially begins in mid-week. They feel the next government of New Brunswick will have on its agenda the revision of the Official Languages Act since they have no choice - it is required by law.

The three Francophone Acadian groups will be well prepared for the review process and have decided to start the debate immediately, claimed lawyer Michel Doucet of the International Observatory. They already met with the Prime Minister on August 14 and want the Francophone community to have its own working committee for this review. They have declared "If the government is not ready, we will be. "

The conference will primarily be an exercise in understanding the strengths and weaknesses of this Act, and an analysis on the changes needed, if any.

"The Official Languages Act of 2002 has led to major advances in the language employed by municipalities, police, health services, in terms of creating the post of Commissioner of Official Languages. But is seen as having been adopted without debate around the law without any input from the community. Some of the provisions which were considered very attractive are still very ambiguous, For example, the police. When we say that the police officer who arrests someone on the roadside has a duty to provide service in the language of the choice of their client in a reasonable time What does "reasonable" mean? Some courts say that 45 minutes is reasonable. Others say the opposite, "says Michel Doucet. The lawyer explained that the symposium will provide Acadians to review various aspects of the law in deciding whether there should be improvements, especially when it comes to service delivery and working language in the public or powers of the Commissioner of Official Languages.

"What do people want? Do they want to make improvements to the law? It is quite possible that we are mistaken and that people say it is just fine."

"The invitation to the general public, the Acadian organizations. We hope to have a lot of people because it is of public interest," adds his colleague AJEFNB.

Following discussions, a report with recommendations will be submitted to the government. The President said that his organization SANB will push for a committee to be established jointly with the government to follow up on this issue.

How long will you watch?

The Federal Government and the Province of New Brunswick are now under total French control. English speaking Canadians no longer have any Language or Political rights whatsoever. The Province of New Brunswick is now an official Forced Bilingual Province and without a vote or referendum.

  All bilingual jobs in New Brunswick, which means virtually all jobs, go exclusively to French Canadians, many of whom are transported in from Quebec to replace the English employees as soon as they retire or can be phased out.

The English speaking citizens in New Brunswick can no longer seek employment or gain promotions based on Skills, Merit, Education or Experience anymore in our very own Province. Each Bilingual job posted is one more job taken away from the English citizens of New Brunswick.

We have completely lost our rights of full citizens of New Brunswick. We “The English Canadians” can no longer be employed by our Federal Government, Armed Forces, Police Force or any other Federal Government Corporation, Agency, Board or any other entity.

We watch as the French invasion arrives and become more visible with the backing of the Official Language Act and unlimited Federal billions of dollars in funding. We watch the push for “French First bilingual “signage and the push to have the French language included on all commercial signage in New Brunswick. The end to all unilingual English business as we today know it!  From the proposed takeover of the utilities to the ultimate goal of French being the language of work and the whole total transformation to a French-only province.

We Watch!

We watch as our Province gets switched over to “French only” or “French First bilingual Province” and all traces of our English language are diminished. From the banning of our right to advertise in the language of our choice, the English language to the replacement of road signs from English to French or to bilingual but with French first. All just an attempt to portray New Brunswick as a French only province! We have lost the right to advertise in the language of our choice.

We watch as our English families and friends leave our Province to seek employment only to make room for the new bilingual employees (French first with little or broken garbled English)  as they arrive from Quebec to replace us.

We watch as our fellow employees get bonuses and promotions at work based solely on what language they speak and while we work, stuck at the bottom of the ladder because we don’t meet the language qualifications for a job, bonus or promotion based on our choice of our English language.

We watch as our Government “over run with French control’ tries to sells our utilities and Corporations to Quebec.

We watch as we are discriminated against, looked down upon and treated as second class citizens because of what language we speak or because of what language we don’t speak. We are no longer allowed be English Citizens of New Brunswick.

We watch as the Acadian BANNER , which is nothing more than a flag of France with a star on it be allowed to be flown in front of our Government and Municipal buildings and offices to represent the French language and culture in New Brunswick while the Anglophone flag which represent the English language and culture in New Brunswick is Not allowed to be flown in front of Government buildings.

The Minority population of New Brunswick (the, French) are allowed to fly their flag but the majority Population of New Brunswick, (the English) are not allowed to fly their flag in front of Government buildings. There is something wrong with this picture!

We are forced to learn another language and we watch while the minority controls the majority. We watch as we are forced to preserve another language and culture other than our own. We watch until we have no rights left whatsoever. We are the FORCED people!

We the English speaking Canadians being as trusting and gullible as we are, just sit back and let ourselves and our children get brainwashed into believing that French is a good thing for us and that if we and our children don’t learn to speak French then we will have no future at all in New Brunswick or in Canada.

If you force me to learn another language so that I can communicate with you in the language of YOUR choice and so that you can be served in the language of YOUR choice because that’s your RIGHT, then you are taking away my RIGHT to communicate in the language of MY choice.

We watch until we have no choice in language left. We watch as we have no more rights to seek employment in our own language, Advertise or live in the language of our choice in New Brunswick.

We watch as they strip us of all our rights to exist in the language of our choice! We can no longer be English speaking citizens of New Brunswick! We are being forced to be speak and learn French while they annihilate all existence of the Unilingual English Canadian.

How long will you watch?

Tim Williams (Tiger)

Riverview , New Brunswick.

Supreme Bilingualism

June 4, 2010

by Kim McConnell

Karen Selick, of the Canadian Constitution Foundation (CCF), appeared recently (May 28) on TVO’s The Agenda with Steve Paikin.

The CCF’s mission is simple: "To protect the constitutional freedoms of Canadians through education, communication and litigation."

The CCF takes an interest in many challenges in our legal system and this show with Steve Paikin gives you an idea of how lucky we are that there is an organization in Canada that is in a position to speak up about our most urgent problem currently – the bilingualization of our Supreme Court.

Take time to listen to this show and understand how important it is that the Conservative Senators get the help of the independent Senators to effectively block this bill.  Claudette Tardiff is working very hard to get this bill passed which will doubtless ensure that our Supreme Court will be made up mainly of Francophone judges.

The policy of Official Bilingualism has been an unmitigated failure and most Canadians know this – after over 40 years, our general population is still not bilingual and those who are functionally bilingual are mostly French-speakers first.  Can we expect that the legal profession will be any different from the general population? 

Granted they are made of the elite of society and are above average in intelligence but linguistic prowess is not necessarily directly related to intellect – it is more a question of opportunity and living in an environment where the other language is spoken.

How else can you explain why most English-speaking Canadians outside Quebec are not as likely to be fluently bilingual as English-speakers in Quebec where French is heard on a daily basis? 

How else can you explain that the French-speakers are over-represented in the public service, in the Armed Forces and just about everywhere that the policy of Official Bilingualism is the prime criteria for promotion? There is absolutely no doubt that this will happen in the Supreme Court too if Bill C-232 gets through the Senate.

The Liberals, the NDP and the Bloc are solidly behind this bill and the Conservatives are working diligently to stop this bill so it is incumbent upon us to do whatever we can to lobby the Conservative and independent Senators to block it. Send a message to Karen Selick with your views to:

kselick@canadianconstitutionfoundation.ca

Karen is also looking for statistics on the success or failure of the French Immersion program anywhere in Canada because this will help with her arguments that, despite the widespread effort of the Federal government to expand French Immersion, the success of this policy is not impressive.

http://www.tvo.org/cfmx/tvoorg/theagenda/index.cfm?page_id=7&bpn=779794&ts=2010-05-28%2020:00:00.0

Best,

Kim

---

CLF received many messages from our support base urging that all Canadians should do something to lobby the Senate to block this bill – here is one written by a retired lawyer:

If it passes the Senate, it will become the law of Canada and given the ever growing power of the Supreme Court of Canada, such a development would be the most dangerous threat to the Freedom of Canadians in memory. 

Bottom-line - it must not be allowed to pass the Senate!

Directly below, you will find a list of reasons why Justices of the Supreme Court of Canada should not be required to be bilingual.

Further below, you will find several ways in which to make your views known to the two (2) people we must all get to before the Senate votes on Bill C232  - the Prime Minister and the Conservative Leader of the Senate.

When making your views known, using some or all of the reasons listed below, try to incorporate them in your own words since that will have the most impact in getting our collective message across.

Okay, here are the Main Reasons why Forced Bilingualism of Supreme Court Justices is a very, very bad idea:

• With only 17% of the population claiming to be bilingual (the actual number is likely far less), to require all candidates for Justices to be bilingual would mean that you are not ensuring that the brightest and the best lawyers even get considered for these most important positions. (i.e.  at least 83% are not bilingual).
  
• Moreover, since  most claiming to be bilingual reside in Quebec and to a much lesser extent Eastern Ontario, it would mean that the vast majority of bilingual candidates would reside in Central Canada.  The East and the West would effectively be shut out of the Court.
  
• Related to the above, with Central Canada's greater influence on the Court, its decisions will become even more out of touch with main stream society (i.e. even more politically correct and left leaning).
  
• To add insult to injury, it is now mandatory that 1/3 of the nine justices hail from the Province of Quebec, so with a bilingual requirement applying to all Justices, Quebec's contingent can be expected to increase dramatically on the Court.  This despite the fact that with a third of the Justices now having to come from Quebec and given that Quebec contains less than a fourth of Canada's population, they are substantially over-represented already.
  
• With the introduction of the Charter of Rights in 1981, the Supreme Court went from interpreting the laws to making laws.  This can be seen from its too often politically correct and left leaning decisions. In many respects it has usurped the power of Parliament. Should the Court become fully bilingual, this can only be expected to get worse, -  again because the area of selection is reduced does not represent the interests of the majority.  In effect, the Court and not Parliament will rule completely Supreme.

Okay, who to Contact:

1. The Prime Minister of Canada:
Mr.  Stephen Harper
80 Wellington Street
Ottawa, K1A 0A2
Email address: pm@pm.gc.ca
Fax: (613) 941-6900

2. Mrs. Marjory LeBreton (she is English)
The Senate of Canada
Ottawa, Ontario K1A 0A4
Telephone - (613) 943-0756

Email lebrem@sen.parl.gc.ca

Best, Kim

Karen Selick: If the Supreme Court isn't broken...

by Karen Selick
National Post, April 23, 2010

http://network.nationalpost.com/NP/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2010/04/23/karen-selick-if-the-supreme-court-isn-t-broke.aspx

If ever Canada’s Senate needed an opportunity to demonstrate its value by imparting “sober second thought” to the legislative process, that moment arrived on April 13, 2010, when Bill C-232 landed on Senators’ desks.

A private member’s bill promulgated in the House of Commons by New Brunswick NDP member Yvon Godin, C-232 would require that all future judges appointed to the Supreme Court of Canada (SCC) be able to understand both French and English “without the assistance of an interpreter.”

The bill whizzed through the Commons in less than a month.  It passed by 140 votes to 137, supported by the NDP, the Bloc Québécois and the Liberals, with 31 members of the 308-member house unaccounted for. What little debate occurred indicated that some MPs are shockingly ill-informed about Canadian law and court procedures.

The case was already made in a National Post editorial published April 20 (“How to ruin the Supreme Court”) that superior legal reasoning, rather than superior linguistic skills, should be the definitive criterion for appointment to the court. The editorial also pointed out that the bill would ensure the future domination of the SCC by judges from Quebec, thereby diminishing the court’s credibility for many in the rest of Canada.

But the bill raises additional questions. One is whether it would even be constitutional. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms requires laws to be non-discriminatory on the basis of characteristics such as ethnic origin. Case precedents say that even neutrally worded laws can be discriminatory if in practice they have what’s called the “adverse effect” of excluding large swaths of the population belonging to a particular group. This law would in practice discriminate against those of Anglophone or immigrant origin, since statistically they are far less likely to be fully bilingual.

While the Constitution does permit affirmative action programs to override the equality guarantee in order to benefit disadvantaged individuals, it is hard to imagine bilingual appellate court judges or bilingual lawyers with 10 years’ experience — the two groups who would benefit by this bill — being characterized as disadvantaged.

Discrimination is sometimes a tolerated evil when job criteria are bona fide occupational requirements. However, none of the bill’s proponents produced even a single example of an SCC decision that appeared to have been wrongly decided because of faulty translations. If it were true that judges cannot genuinely understand a case unless they have read it in its original language, the court’s 143-year history should be riddled with instances of judicial misunderstanding.  Instead, MPs who spoke in favour of the bill mentioned problems such as long waiting times for French-language trials in lower courts, or inaccurate amateur translations of election campaign literature — both utterly irrelevant to what goes on in the SCC.

One MP argued that there may be nuances of language that cannot be conveyed in a translation no matter how proficient the translator. But would such extreme subtleties necessarily be understood even by all native speakers of the original language? How fully do any two people ever really understand each other? Every human being brings to each communication his own unique experience and knowledge. The need for explanation and clarification due to these differences among individuals is probably more common than the occasional instance when a nuance cannot be translated into another language, yet we don’t conclude that justice therefore cannot be done.

In any event, Supreme Court judges aren’t locked away in isolation chambers with nothing but their own brains to rely upon. The court’s practice is actually to convene en masse and discuss the cases before writing their decisions. If it appears during these meetings that the Anglophone justices are missing some poorly translated nuance of French, no doubt the francophones — there are three positions reserved on the SCC for justices from Quebec — will let them know.

If we concede to the fallacious argument that those who interpret our laws must be able to understand them in both languages, surely the next demand will be that those who make the laws — all MPs and Senators — should be similarly capable. Otherwise, how would they really know what laws they are enacting? If court translations are inadequate, parliamentary translations must be equally suspect.  

This of course is nonsense, just as the premise behind Bill C-232 is nonsense. One cannot help but suspect that this attempt to pack the court with francophones has ideological roots rather than any genuine concern about comprehension. 

The law wasn’t broken, so let’s hope the Senate has the good sense not to capitulate to this spurious attempt to fix it. 

National Post

Supreme Court for bilingual judges only?

by Brian Lilley
Ottawa Bureau Chief for Newstalk 1010

http://www.newstalk1010.com/blog/1117828

"What galls me," says retired Supreme Court justice John Major, "is that people like Bob Rae and Ignatieff vote for it."

It's shocking for a former justice of Canada's highest court to make such a direct statement about current politicians but Major is clearly annoyed at the passage of Bill C-232 in the House of Commons. The private members bill from the NDP's Yvon Godin passed third reading in the House on March 31^st with very little media attention and is now up for debate in the House of Commons. The bill would require every judge appointed to Canada's high court to be able to understand English and French without an interpreter.

On the face of it, that is a mild bill and many would say not a terribly taxing demand to make of a judge that will hear cases in both official languages. That view however takes the bill at face value and does not consider how official Ottawa implements things like language laws.

Justices on the Supreme Court hear very complex legal cases from both the common law and civil code systems, the impact of this bill is that it would require all judges to be able to hear cases at the highest level with no interpretation or translation assistance. According to Justice Major, that would eliminate most of the current court, "In the present court, there's a fair number who can carry on a conversation in French," says Major. "But there are only three completely bilingual judges."

Major's count of three is not the three judges that must be appointed from Quebec because he says at least one of the Quebec justices needs help going from English into French. Also among those that would not meet the test to be appointed is Chief Justice Beverly McLachlin who when she was appointed in 1989 was not bilingual but has since improved her French.

Justice Major argues that legal competency and not linguistic competency should be the standard for appointing judges, it's an argument backed by the government but rejected by all three opposition parties, including the Liberals which is why Major is critiquing Rae and Ignatieff directly. "Bob Rae is a trained lawyer, he was a Rhodes Scholar, he's an intelligent man, he knows the pros and cons of all this and he should have known better. And Ignatieff is the leader of the opposition who supposedly has the interest of the whole country but he's pandering to this New Brunswick motion." The pandering in Major's view is that there will be very few completely bilingual judges or lawyers west of Manitoba.

That's an argument the supporters of the bill expected and both Liberal MP Mauril Belanger and Bloc Quebecois MP Nicole Demers point to the requirement that anyone who wants to be prime minister needs to be bilingual. True, but not the point. Politics is a career one aspires to and works toward by ticking off a number of achievements along the way, do we really want people essentially campaigning for a spot on the Supreme Court based on something other than their legal mind.

There is plenty of animosity to official bilingualism across Canada and I have spent plenty of time explaining to family and friends in southern Ontario that there is a real French fact in the eastern part of our province, some of them remain unconvinced. On the flip-side of that equation, there are plenty of people in Ottawa and Montreal that have trouble believing that it is so hard to learn both languages. Yet in much of the country Italian, Chinese or Polish would be easier to learn that French because unlike French, you actually meet people that speak those other languages in your daily life. French outside of certain parts of Canada must be sought out, it is not easy to find.

Don't get me wrong, bilingualism is an asset that should be strongly considered and encouraged but why should a brilliant legal mind, say a Francophone from the Saugenay or an Anglophone from Red Deer, be denied a spot on the nation's top court due to language.  When Justice McLachlin came to the court in 1989 she was able to improve her French through studying the language and living in the language.

All three of the fully bilingual judges, LeBel, Fish and Charron were able to live and work in bilingual environments before being appointed to the court, an opportunity few people from British Columbia, the Prairies or certain parts of Quebec might have. The simple fact of the matter is that our court has a regional system that requires one judge from British Columbia and one from the Prairies two places where French is scarce. And despite what your trip to the Montreal Jazz Festival last year might have convinced you, not everyone is Quebec is bilingual.

For all of these reasons and probably some more, this bill deserves some sober second thought in the Senate even if, irony of ironies, it requires the Conservatives to beg some of those unelected Liberal Senators to help deliver it.