Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!neat.cs.toronto.edu!lamy
Newsgroups: can.francais
From: lamy@cs.utoronto.ca (Jean-Francois Lamy)
Subject: Re: Sault Sainte-Marie officiellement unilingue anglophone
Message-ID: <90Feb6.184805est.6212@neat.cs.toronto.edu>
Keywords: Sault Sainte-Marie Kapuskasing
References: <1990Feb5.182925.2005@jarvis.csri.toronto.edu> <90521@looking.on.ca>
Distribution: can
Date: 6 Feb 90 23:48:34 GMT
Lines: 31

brad@looking.on.ca (Brad Templeton) writes:

>French.  If I lived in Que'bec I wouldn't complain if they wanted to
>make some city services available only in french.  In fact, I wouldn't
>be surprised if this isn't the case already.

Nope, sorry.  The English minority has a *right* to services in English in
Que'bec.  Things like education in English and social services in English are
guaranteed for the English minority without arbitrary population thresholds.
Bills 22 and 101 never took those individual rights away.  The debate about
store signs in English had to do with whether or not commercial signage was an
individual right of that nature (as opposed to a commercial activity that
could be regulated by Quebec).

>Now, if a city had a large number of unilingual speakers of a given
>language, then it would be proper for them to offer all services in
>that language, or make translators available.  But there has to be
>some limit to this.

You are already requiring that there be a large number.  What is that, if not
a limit?  Having cities with 2% francophones revolt against something THAT
DOES NOT APPLY TO CITIES and for which they would not be bound EVEN IF it
applied to them can very easily be perceived as a direct attempt to insult
francophones. I used to shiver at people in Quebec contending that Quebec was
being too nice by guaranteeing its Anglophone minority rights to education,
social and governement services in English.  Were they right all along?  How
many insults of the St-Mary Falls Bigots variety will it take before I change
my mind and begin to think that I was a fool for upholding such principles?

Jean-Francois Lamy               lamy@cs.utoronto.ca, uunet!cs.utoronto.ca!lamy
Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto, Canada M5S 1A4