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 hitting the nail on the head in French. Respond directly to the Anglos who want a bilingual Quebec. And to regularly remind the tearful Montreal Gazette columnists to stop playing the victim.
Calimero
In the last few days the Gazette has already published not one, not two, not three, but FOUR columns complaining about the poor plight of the oppressed poor Anglo people. And it's only the first week of January!
First text: Toula Drimonis never lacks alarmist expressions, always on the verge of lexical apoplexy. He 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 such. They are so “threatened” that they “feel like they no longer have a future here have”.
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 and Portuguese.” »
Read me carefully, Madame Drimonis. Montreal will never be anything but officially and unofficially French. As if Rome were Italian. Just like Athens is Greek. And since Toronto is unmistakably and monolingually English.
Second text: Bill Brownstein is “afraid” that Canadians, Americans and even people from “all over the world” will feel unwelcome in Quebec when they hear about the Frenchization clauses.
“Cynics have raised the possibility of a ban on tourists who do not speak an intermediate level of French.”
“Clouds” and “a storm” on the language front could have negative effects on Montreal’s economy, such as “brain drain,” and the city could even become a “backwater”!
In short, the seven plagues of Egypt. I just miss the frogs falling from the sky.
Third text: Allison Hanes claims that, unlike the evil Legault government and its “populist resentment,” Quebecers are “inclusive” because they love bilingualism, support bilingualism and celebrate bilingualism. That's why it's great that residents in downtown Montreal speak to each other in both languages!
Fourth text: Former minister Clifford Lincoln calls for graduates of English-speaking universities to speak out loudly and clearly on the CAQ measures. Perfect! I graduated from McGill in 1987. And I welcome the government's call for McGill graduates to be able to order smoked meats and Putin at Schwartz's.
Lincoln regrets that the CAQ “targets the English minority relentlessly and with a spirit of revenge,” “mean” and “petty dictates,” “compulsive bias,” “animus toward a language group,” and “abusive demands.”
“Enough is enough,” he wrote in French….
Master in our house
During the holidays, former PQ leader Jean-François Lisée visited Club Med in Charlevoix. “There were times when we could not be served in French, not even at the reception and in the ski rental,” he wrote on X.
You can't be served in French in Charlevoix, my bad!
And all the while the Anglos of Quebec are complaining about mistreatment?
It's obscene!