"We have won"

Tim Denton assesses the absurdities and iniquities of bilingualism in Canada and points out that the Québécois are no longer in any real sense "Canadiens":

The truth is, we do not have a country in common, or of we do it is scarcely a common vision. We have federal institutions in common. I know these are tough words, but look at the reality. The government of the province of Quebec is continuing to separate from the rest of the country, at a pace of its own choosing. No one in English Canada is raising much resistance to this development, nor could they if they wanted to...

...French Canadians have a bilingual elite who does the talking for them, and that elite has created those linguistic-political conditions to their own advantage.

This leaves French increasingly in the position as a language that a privileged group of English-Canadians speak as a password into the higher reaches of the federal public service and national politics. It becomes a badge of class distinction. Fraser's policy prescription against teaching French to federal civil servants has the effect of further cementing the role of French as the entree into a world of legal and social privilege, even as the language declines in relative use worldwide, and in Canada, to something that once upon a time mattered, in a different world long since past...

...I agree with Pierre Bourgault, the separatist intellectual, who said "We have won". They did. I will continue to visit the place on weekends, as will Graham Fraser and Reed Scowen. But my life and that of several hundreds of thousands of others has shifted to a land of greater opportunity.

But the RoC continues to dream it's life away.

Mark C.

Posted by markc at August 9, 2007 10:05 PM