After the Montreal Gazette then CJAD, that’s it Maclean’s wants us to believe that Quebec is hell.
The Canadian magazine has just published a testimonial entitled “Anglophone students are not welcome in Quebec, so I’m leaving!”
Except that the tearful story is that of… a French speaker!
Prepare your tissues
This is the “shocking” story of Joël Louiseize, a Franco-Ontarian, who left a small town in Ontario to study in Montreal. His girlfriend, Kaitlyn, was hesitant to move because she didn’t speak a word of French… but Joël reassured her: “Montreal is full of Anglos.”
Joël and Kaitlyn live in Rosemont. Joël is very angry because, when he speaks French, people recognize his Franco-Ontarian accent and sometimes speak to him in English.
On “a few occasions,” retail employees made fun of Kaitlyn’s total lack of French. She therefore restricts her purchases to self-checkouts or asks Joël to do her shopping for her.
When Kaitlyn had to be hospitalized, the staff first “pretended not to understand English” but then “switched to perfect English.”
Joël has the nerve to write: “These types of surreal, Kafkaesque experiences left us perplexed. The more we tried to integrate, the more people rejected our efforts.”
He announces that he will leave Quebec and return to Ontario “because of the discouraging treatment we received from the locals.”
Kaitlyn is not able to integrate in French… while her boyfriend is French-speaking?
“We felt like strangers, unappreciated, unwanted,” writes Joël.
In Montreal, Kaitlyn benefits from radios and TV in English, cinemas in English, English bookstores, an English daily… and she doesn’t feel “desired”?
A French speaker leaves Ontario (where French people constitute a neglected minority) for Quebec, the only French-speaking province, and he whines while his girlfriend doesn’t speak a word of French?
And Maclean’s publishes this as if Quebec were a “totalitarian state without the gulag” (to use the title of Mathieu Bock-Côté’s latest book).
Joël complains that at Concordia, his tuition fees will increase by $3,000 because of the Legault government’s new rules… but he flees to Toronto where he himself admits that “the cost of living is much higher” .
So, in the end, it will cost him more to study in Toronto!
Let’s speak bilingual
Joël complains that Montreal is no longer “a multicultural and inclusive city.”
For what? “In Quebec, we have dismantled the bilingual aspects of everyday life; people have the right to their culture as long as it is in a French framework,” he says.
The cat is out of the bag: what Joël criticizes Quebec is… for not being bilingual!
“Although French is my first language, I constantly immerse myself in English-language media and books and consider English to be part of my cultural identity – and it is something I would like to maintain without they put barriers in front of me.”
If Joël wants to live “bilingually”, without barriers, he can move to New Brunswick, the only officially bilingual province in the country.
Looking forward to knowing how his French will be received there.
We will read this in a future issue of Maclean’s. Or not.