Have you made your New Year’s resolutions? I do. It’s not about losing weight or drinking more green tea.
My resolutions for 2024 are to continue to hit the nail on the head in French. To respond head to head to the Anglos who want a bilingual Quebec. And to regularly remind the whining columnists of the Montreal Gazette to stop playing the victim.
Calimero
Over the past few days, the Gazette has already published not one, not two, not three but FOUR columns complaining about the poor fate of oppressed Anglo poor people. And it’s only the first week of January!
First text: never short of alarmist expressions, always on the verge of lexical apoplexy, Toula Drimonis speaks of the “constant attacks” of the Legault government which uses the language issue as “a weapon” against allophones and Anglos, who are treated as a “threat” to such an extent that they “no longer feel they have a future here.”
Toula Drimonis hopes that in 2024 the government will understand that “Montreal is proudly and officially French but will never be only French, because this city is also English, Spanish, Arabic, Greek, Vietnamese, Italian, Creole, Armenian, Punjabi, Portuguese. »
Read me carefully, Madame Drimonis. Montreal will never be anything other than officially and unofficially French. Like Rome is Italian. Like Athens is Greek. And as Toronto is unmistakably and unilingually English.
Second text: Bill Brownstein is “afraid” that upon hearing about the francization clauses, Canadians, Americans and even people from “the whole world” will not feel welcome in Quebec.
“Cynics have raised the possibility of a ban targeting tourists who do not speak an intermediate level of French.”
“Clouds” and “a storm” on the linguistic front could have a negative impact on Montreal’s economy, such as “brain drain” and the city could even become “a backwater”!
In short, the seven plagues of Egypt. Just missing the frogs falling from the sky.
Third text: Allison Hanes asserts that unlike the nasty Legault government and its “populist resentment”, Quebecers are “inclusive” because they love bilingualism, embrace bilingualism, celebrate bilingualism. So it’s great that in downtown Montreal, residents speak to each other in both languages!
Fourth text: former minister Clifford Lincoln demands that graduates of English-speaking universities speak out loud and clear on the CAQ measures. Perfect! I am a 1987 graduate of McGill. And I applaud the government’s demand that graduates leave McGill able to order smoked meat and poutine at Schwartz’s.
Lincoln deplores that the CAQ “targets the English minority relentlessly and with a spirit of vengeance”, “mean” and “petty diktats”, “obsessive bias”, “animus towards a linguistic group” and “abusive demands” .
“Enough is enough,” he wrote in French….
Master at our house
During the holidays, former PQ leader Jean-François Lisée went to Club Med in Charlevoix. “There were times when we were unable to be served in French, including at the reception and at the ski rental shop,” he wrote on X.
You can’t be served in French in Charlevoix, misery!
And meanwhile, the Anglos of Quebec complain of being mistreated?
It’s obscene!