En anglais s’il vous plait?

Have you ever walked into a store or a restaurant in downtown Montreal and seen this sticker on the front door?

“Here we do business in French,” is basically how you get greeted at may retail outlets. Now, of course, you may think -as I do- that having these stickers on the doors of Montreal businesses is absolutely unnecessary. After all, it’s Montreal, I know you speak French. What I would really want to know is if I’m going to be able to order my cheeseburger in English. How about a “we speak English here” kind of thing? You know, just so I can feel more welcome. I looked for a “we speak English” sticker the other day as I walked into a clothing store. It must be somewhere, I thought, but in smaller print of course. But no, I couldn’t find it.

The “Ici on commerce en français” stickers are part of the Office québécois de la langue française’s (better known by anglos as the language police) latest campaign against the English language. And yes, I say against the English language because it is exactly that. It is more an attempt to suppress English than to encourage French. The message is very clear: here we do business in French, deal with it, if you want to get served in English, go to Toronto.

Well, surprisingly, in Toronto they’d be more than happy to serve me in French. A recent article in the highly acclaimed 24 Heures explains how Toronto is increasingly becoming French friendly. There are roughly 200 thousand francophones living in Toronto, the article states, and the population of French-speaking Torontonians seems to be on a rise. But unlike us Montrealers, our anglophone friends in Toronto aren’t putting up “here we do business in English” stickers in an effort to protect the English language. On the contrary, they’ll do anything it takes in order to make francophone customers feel welcome, including serving them in French.

Why then do francophone Quebecers insist in making anglos feel like strangers in their own home? Of course I’ve never had any problem  getting served in English in downtown Montreal, but those blue stickers, along with some other French-language campaigns, seem to me almost confrontational. And let’s not mention the fact that you can get fined if the language police finds that your business is breaking one of the absurd language laws. Better make sure your English signs are smaller than the French ones!

What’s going on in Toronto is an example of how things should be done. Rather than confronting people, we should make them feel welcome. Anglophones are an important part of Quebec and they feel as proud of being Quebecers as francophones do. It is of course very important to protect the French language, but not at the expense of alienating others.

Dear candidates

Dear Jean, Pauline, and Mario,

Seeing that you’re going around Quebec making promises in order to get votes, here’s a short list of things I would like (not in any particular order):

1. When I’m sick, I want to be able to see a doctor before either of these two things happens:

a) My body heals itself

b) I die

2. I want to be able to get a job so I can pay for my student loans once I finish school in a few months.

3. I want that woman I saw on the bus with three babies and a huge baby carriage to be able to send all her kids to daycare so she can work..or relax…or make more babies.

4. I want to afford getting on the bus!

5. I want you to stop ignoring Anglophones

6. I want Bill 101 gone (ok that was wishful thinking but hey, it’s the holiday season)

7. I want to be able to see all those packs of cigarettes at the depanneur even if I don’t smoke, because in case you didn’t realize it, we still know they are there!

8. If immigrants are forced to learn French, I want Quebecers to be forced to learn about immigrants.

I think that’s it. I wanted to add yellow margarine to the list but I just remembered we got that last July.

Shamie on you

On November 2004 Gemma Raeburn and two of her friends were cleaning up her garage when six police officers arrived at the scene and drew their guns at them. Their crime? Being black.

Because when you see three black people taking stuff out from a Dollard-des-Ormeaux garage it’s gotta be a break-in right? Well, it turns out the six white cops were wrong and when Raeburn told them that it wouldn’t had happened if she and her friends were white, two of the cops replied with comments such as “bullets don’t see colour” and “why don’t you go back to your own country?”

Completely racist? A Quebec Court judge doesn’t think so. Last month he reversed a 2007 decision by the police ethics committee that gave a one-day and three-day suspension to constables Roger Carbonneau and Isabelle Nault respectively. Judge Mark Shamie seems to think that although the remarks were unfortunate, they weren’t discriminatory.

You’re wrong Judge Shamie. “Why don’t you go back to your own country” is one of the most discriminatory remarks a person can make. By making that comment, these two cops were telling Raeburn and her friends that they were different, that this isn’t really their country because they’re not white and that if they don’t like the way they’re treated they should go back to whatever country they came from.

Judge Shamie’s ruling sends people the wrong message. It says that it’s not a big deal for police officers and other public officials to make discriminatory remarks. And if the police can get away with it, why can’t everyone else?

What Judge Shamie did is nothing else but to condone discrimination. Shouldn’t it be the other way around? Shouldn’t judges, the police, politicians, and everyone else in society for that matter fight against discrimination in this country?

People from all over the world come to Canada because they believe they will have a better life here. And yet many of them have to face constant discrimination because of their skin colour, their religion, the way they dress or the way they talk. This is their country as much as it is everyone else’s.

This is our country no matter our colour or the language we speak.

This is our country no matter if we were born here nor not, if we’re children of immigrants or if our family got here 400 years ago.

No one has the right to tell us to go back to our country because we are already there.

Judge Shamie’s ruling is a setback in the fight against discrimination in this country of ours. What a shame.

Lunch for two

Have you ever had one of those random conversations with a stranger while waiting for the bus or standing at the checkout line at the grocery store? I have, and to be honest, I don’t like them very much. They’re just awkward and I never really know what to say, so I’ll do anything to avoid having to listen to that old lady behind me. Because they’re almost always old ladies.

So you can imagine that when an elderly woman asked me to sit down with her during lunch a few weeks ago, I wasn’t very thrilled. But seeing that there weren’t any other seats available, I thanked her and sat down at her table.

I learned quite a few things during my lunch with Thérèse. She’s retired, she worked as a waitress her whole life, she lives alone in a small but comfy apartment, she enjoys having her coffee at McDonald’s everyday, and she likes watching reality TV shows where participants get paired up in the hope that they’ll find their other half.

“They should do one of those shows for people my age,” she told me.

But the most important thing I learned was the reason why old ladies tend to have conversations with random people like me: they are just lonely.

Like Thérèse, there are more than four million Canadians over the age of 65, and with baby boomers soon to hit the 65-year-old mark, that number will double by 2026.
Although some Canadian seniors try to keep themselves busy by joining volunteer groups or organizations, there is no doubt that many of them live a pretty lonely life. Take Thérèse for example, who spends most of her day watching TV and only dares to go out as far as her local McDonald’s for fear that something will happen to her while she walks alone on the street, or the elderly man in my neighbourhood whose hobby consists of taking the bus back and forth all day long.

Should it then come as a surprise that the percentage of seniors aged 65 to 74 using the Internet more than doubled between 2000 and 2003? Twenty-eight per cent of them are now Internet users, and those aged 75 and up are also catching up on their mouse use. Perhaps the Internet helps them feel a little more connected to the world that seems to have forgotten them.

Maybe if we weren’t so focused on our own lives we would realize that there’s people like Thérèse out there that need some of our time and care. Why is it that we think it’s ok to simply abandon our parents at a retirement home or a small apartment? Are we too busy to take care of them like they took care of us when we were kids?

Granted some seniors still like their privacy and will insist on living on their own while they are still capable of doing so, but that is no excuse for not visiting them, taking them out for lunch, or simply calling them so they have someone to talk to.

Being lonely and having nothing to do aren’t exactly the greatest things in life, and senior citizens could use some of our company. So what can we do? You might have parents or grandparents you might consider seeing more often, or you might want to start volunteering at a retirement home. But most importantly, when the old lady waiting in line behind you starts talking, listen to her. I know next time I will.