This was intentional.
I was forced to take “French” beginning around 7th grade and continuing all through high school. We were informed that if we all didn’t learn French, Quebec would separate from Canada and/or they’d keep on kidnapping and murdering the Prime Minister’s friends.
So? Let them leave, then. And about the Prime Minister’s friends, I cared not a whit.
So I stored enough in my short term memory to get 50s on tests. I got 80s and 90s in all my other classes, so even though, for example, I sat their stone silent with my arms folded during my Grade 12 French oral, they still passed me, because I was “one of the smart kids,” and “smart kids” don’t get failed.
Of course, the damn French never “separated” at all. Sticking around and bitching and blowig up the occasional mailbox turned out to be far more lucrative.
And the Quebeckers I’ve had the misfortune to work with have been such shiftless incompetents that the idea of them running their own country is laughable. Like other non-Anglo Saxon loser cultures, they cultivate a smarmy gigolo-like “charm” to try to disguise their chronic ineptitude.
Luckily, I am immune to “charm.”
Today, there are more Mandarin speakers in Canada than French ones, but so what? A hundred plus years ago, we beat the French to a pulp in a field someplace and so… er, now we have to kowtow to them.
(No, I don’t get it either; don’t let anyone tell you that Israel is alone in its weird “need” to cater to the ancestors of those whose asses it royally kicked…)
And now, as it so often happens, I was, even as a petulant teenager, way ahead of my so-called intellectual superiors, who are finally coming around to my way of thinking…
“Something like 15% of the population [is bilingual], 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, SK, and be upset because they couldn’t get a government service [in their mother tongue].” (…)
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.
