I live in Montreal, on the borders of the Outremont and Côte-des-Neiges districts. With age and due to the pandemic, I increasingly use online delivery. Now, out of ten deliverers, most of them in the service of delivery agencies, there are seven or eight who, at my door, do not speak a single word of French. “Do you want to put the package on the kitchen cupboard next door?” » I said to them : « I don’t speak French they answer me with the assurance of citizens who speak the language of their country, Canada. I have no choice, so I speak to them in their language and they comply with the most grace in the world. They are young, do their job well and often know a language other than English and French. And this is just one example among many in today’s Montreal that is gradually returning to the situation of my childhood, when my mother demanded that they speak French to her at Eaton’s. We could cite here the staff of the parking lots in the city center, that of certain large surfaces, the one who does the cleaning at home and so on.
What do my French-speaking fellow citizens do in these circumstances? To ask the question, is to answer it. Not so long ago, when I was walking along the Côte Sainte-
Catherine to go to my work, young French-speaking couples arriving from the east of the city to drive their children to the Sainte-Justine hospital sometimes stopped to ask me to show them the way to go. As they obviously felt far from home, yet a stone’s throw from the University of Montreal, where, it seems, we hear more and more English spoken, even in class, they spoke to me in English more than lame and seemed surprised at my response in French. I leave to the readers of To have to the care of judging such behavior which is no doubt still found today.
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