Cultural Engineering

This just in from Kim McConnell of the Canadians for Language Fairness, an organization dedicated to changing Canadian bilingual policies and ending the appalling cost and inefficacies. 

In the following letter, Kim congratulates the Ottawa Citizen for acknowledging what Canadians have bee saying for decades: government bilingual policies are not working, are enormously expensive, and are denying highly qualified unilingual applicants access to federal, provincial and municipal jobs.

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

by Kim McConnell

The Ottawa Citizen has really come onside on the language issue.  About time too, I’m glad to say.  For too long, this paper which is read very widely in Ottawa and beyond, is finally admitting that the language policy is “cultural engineering” – that is a biggy!!!  I have to circulate this immediately so that the whole country can rejoice that we’re on the road to having this policy seriously looked at by the powers that be.   Please do your part by circulating to your own personal lists as well as to your local media and your politicians to alert them to the fact that after 40 years of this stupid policy, it is time to take another look.

Can we (supporters of CLF) take any credit for this change of heart?  I’d like to think so!!  Not just for the fact that having a group of people keeping a constant watch on what’s happening with this disastrous failure of a policy must put a damper on the enthusiasm of the Francophones and the Francophiles to keep escalating this social engineering policy that works only for the benefit of a small group of citizens, many of whom are not really all that keen on being a part of the country anyway and are only hanging on for the benefits they can force us to give them.  Always the reason given by those who support this insane policy – it is to keep the country united and together!!!! 

This policy has been so divisive that it is impossible to say that this policy has done anything for unity – the West is totally annoyed with being kept out of the Halls of Power because French was not, is not and will never be a language spoken by the majority of Westerners.  Just the ones who are eager to buy into the policy because they are linguistically gifted and are willing to send their children to French Immersion to learn to appreciate a language & culture that will give them a shot at a government position.  The rest of the citizenry just don’t give a fig because they don’t aspire to a government position anyway, forgetting that this policy is changing the country so drastically and so effectively that we don’t even notice that most positions of power are held by people who are French-speakers first. 

Quebec’s views on anything, domestic or international, are given more attention; Quebec separatists get to control what historical events in our country are to be given public financing and public display; Quebec is the only province allowed to publicly discriminate against their English-speaking minority while the Rest (Most) of Canada is forced to toe the line and put French-speakers on a pedestal!!!  Is it any wonder that many of us are just sick & tired of having Quebec, a province that lives off the rest of us, hold so much influence & power?

I had prepared a special message to highlight the situation in New Brunswick but for the moment I’m going to circulate that only to the New Brunswickers on my list.  This is so that you don’t get bombarded with too many messages that may not interest you.  I have tried to keep our supporters separated by province whenever I can – this helps when people let me know which province they come from.  Information that affects Westerners get messages that focus on the West; information that affects the Eastern provinces get messages that focus on the East.  If you like me to do that, reply to me with this information & I’ll be glad to help make our messages a little more meaningful for you.

Kim McConnell

 

Cultural Engineering

The Ottawa Citizen Nov. 28, 2009

Official Languages Commissioner Graham Fraser is only the latest critic to note some of the flaws in the way the federal government trains and tests government employees to meet language requirements.

Current and former public servants have also expressed concern that taxpayers' dollars are being spent to help government employees learn how to pass French tests and keep their jobs, without necessarily becoming fluent in, or even using, the language.

More at: http://www.ottawacitizen.com/opinion/Cultural+engineering/2279442/story.html

Kim commented further on the matter in a letter posted online in yesterday’s Citizen (Nov. 29). 

It is amazing that once the floodgate is open, such a torrent of comments have poured through from English-speakers who have been frustrated by the Official Languages policy and the inept way it has been administered.  Nobody is against service in French to French-speakers but this does not require ALL management positions to be made bilingual imperative, at the expense of the Merit Principle, sacrificing a large number of experienced people who were forced to quit out of sheer frustration.

No, it is not laziness on the part of English-speakers that explains their lack of success, Antiwhiner!!  In Quebec where the French-speakers are in the majority, most English-speakers are bilingual because they are surrounded by French-speakers.  However, French is spoken by a miniscule number of Canadians (only 3% of Canada outside Quebec are classified as French-speakers) and it is not easy to become fluently bilingual unless one goes out of one’s way to be immersed in French.   French-speakers outside Quebec pick up English by osmosis because they are surrounded by English-speakers. In addition to that, it is a proven fact (admitted to by Liberal MP Lloyd Francis, now deceased) that the French tests for English-speakers are far more difficult than the English tests for French speakers - and very few English-speakers can pass the test at the BBB designation.

Apart from all of the above, why should a minority language spoken in a small part of Canada, be imposed on the majority on the futile premise that it will unite the country?  Canada is more disunited than ever before in our history and further pursuit of this expensive, failed cultural engineering policy will lead to the eventual breakup of the country with the Western provinces walking away from Eastern & Central Canada. 
--Kim McConnell

Read the other comments on bilingualism at:

http://www.ottawacitizen.com/opinion/Cultural+engineering/2279442/story.html#Comments

Association of Canadian Studies complains Ottawa not sufficiently bilingual

Jack Jedwab, executive director of the Association of Canadian Studies, is disappointed that Ottawa has fewer bilingual speakers than does Gatineau. “I’m kind of surprised that Ottawa would be dragging down Gatineau so much in terms of the level of bilingualism.”

Mr. Jedwab apparently sees the Canadian albatross of bilingualism through the prism of Francophones, a view that requires Canadians to learn French because it is our official duty to do so. It says so in the constitution.

Fortunately, Canadians generally have other ideas of what is  important in the life of our nation and speaking French out of a misplaced sense of duty (or sense of guilt at having not lost in 1759) is not one of them.

People learn a second language when it is their interest to do so. Europeans and Asians speak English, not because England demands they do so, but simply because speaking English makes it easier to function in the modern world. The reason most Americans, British, and Canadians don’t speak a second language is because we don’t have to; most of the rest of the world speaks English.

Mr. Jedwab’s maudlin complaint that “… efforts to promote official bilingualism were not going much further than jobs within the federal government.” ignores two salient factors:

1. our very human inclination to learn only that which satisfies our curiosity or that which gains us an advantage

2. our very human inclination to resist learning French because they demand that we do so and because we find their whine unpalatable.

The global spread of English is a seismic event in Man's history

(I found a link to an article, “The global spread of English is a seismic event in Man’s history“, in the newsletter published by Canadians For Language Fairness Inc.

What follows is excerpted from the article, which was written by Matthew Parris after visiting some Ethiopian schools in 2005. Mr. Parris describes the extent to which the English language has permeated into some of the most impoverished and remote regions of the world.

I include it in FrenchWhine to emphasize the futility of the Quebecois in pursuing their irritating and tiresome efforts to force the French language upon the Rest of Canada even while the English language is being so eagerly sought by the Rest of the World.  -–JGP)

by Matthew Parris
Times Online
January 15, 2005

At Digum school, I also sat through a Grade 8 class of 56 students. Here in the top form boys and girls aged between 10 and 20 were being coached by the excellent Mr Hailay. He was teaching the uses of “just”, “already” , “up to now”, “yet”, “ever” and “never”, and, astonishingly, most of them had a pretty good grasp. Over the shoulder of the boy in front I read his battered computer-printout English textbook, instructing the reader in the correct tenses to use in reported speech. I asked Mr Hailay if I might ask his pupils a few questions.

Did they want to learn English? Yes, replied everyone. Why? “It is the language of the world, and I want to know the world,” replied one boy.

I asked what other languages they would acquire if they could. Spanish, Chinese and Arabic were cited in reply, but none had any plans to learn these. To my surprise, one of the boys asked me afterwards what language I spoke — was I Italian, he wondered? I saw that knowledge of English was not regarded as an indication of nationality, but as a possession, a philosopher’s stone: one which anyone could get. At Digum, they were struggling to get it.

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The spread of English across the globe is a seismic event in our species’ history. It is one of the biggest things to happen to mankind since the dawn of language. Speech is fundamental not just to communication but to the process of thought itself. No single language has ever before approached universality. English is now doing so. No other language has ever advanced as far, as fast, as ours. This is the first time in history that it has been possible to denote one language as predominant.

Within the lifetimes of Times readers, every other serious contender for that status has been eliminated. French is dying outside France. “Francophone” Africa is turning to English. Portuguese Africa is abandoning Portuguese. German made a small, temporary advance across emergent Eastern Europe but elsewhere outside Germany it is dead. Russian, which we once thought we would all have to learn, is finished. The Japanese are learning English - and developing their own pet variant. China will resist, but Mandarin and Cantonese are not advancing beyond their native speakers.

More of the world’s new Muslims are learning English than Arabic. Spanish alone is raising its status and reach — but among Americans, who have English already. India is making an industry out of English speaking, as call-centers daily remind us. A quarter century ago, as the dismemberment of our Empire neared completion, we might have thought that the predominance of our language had passed its zenith. It was, in fact, only the dawn.

It is imponderable what may be the consequences of the advance of this linguistic tide. Within a few generations and for the first time in the story of Homo sapiens, most of our species may be able to communicate in a single language.

The advantage lent to us British by our fluency (and that of the Americans) in this world language, should not be exaggerated. The number of native English speakers may not grow much; our relative influence may decline. They know little of us in Ethiopia. Yet all over that country street signs and business billboards are appearing in English, beneath the Amharic. English is cool. The very lettering confers status.

There will be no point in fighting this or regretting it. We should just take pride in what we have started. It gives us no mastery and nor should it, but it gives us a link. All the world will have an open gate into our story, our culture, our ideas, our literature, our poetry and our song. And we into theirs.

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Canadians for Language Fairness is a group that “Advocate(s), on behalf of the vast majority of Canada's Citizens, against the damage being caused to them by enforced bilingualism. In particular, Canadians for Language Fairness (CLF) is concerned about the growing trend in meaningful jobs being denied to Canadians simply because they do not speak French.”

clf1@sympatico.ca