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From: dennis@gpu.utcs.utoronto.ca (Dennis Ferguson)
Date: Sat, 30-Sep-89 20:29:01 EDT
Message-ID: <1989Sep30.202901.13550@gpu.utcs.utoronto.ca>
Organization: Mechanical Engineering, University of Toronto
Newsgroups: can.general,can.politics
Subject: Re: postings in the French language
References: <25215DA9.12769@maccs.dcss.mcmaster.ca> <3301@watale.waterloo.edu> <555@fs1.ee.ubc.ca> <3305@watale.waterloo.edu>
Reply-To: dennis@gpu.utcs.utoronto.ca (Dennis Ferguson)
Distribution: can

I have been following the traffic on language in Quebec, and French
in recent newsgroup postings, and thought I might contribute something
which, while not quite to the point, might help explain why I have
some sympathy for the position of the Quebec government and Francophones
in Quebec.

My home town is Sudbury, in northeastern Ontario.  I suspect the majority
of people in Ontario whose mother tongue is French live in this part
of the province and I'm pretty sure at least half of the population
in Sudbury when I lived there was French.

You could never have told this by looking at the place in the 60's and
early 70's, however.  Or even by living in it.  All signs were in
English.  Many streets had French names, but these were universally
pronounced with an English twang.  If you went shopping you did it
in English.  If you wanted a phone number from Bell information you
asked in English.  Your hydro bills, and tax bills, and whatever
else, all were written in English.

The Catholic school board was large, and perhaps half of their primary
schools (a third of the total) were French.  The public school board
ran no French language primary schools.  Since the Ontario government
didn't fund the Catholic board beyond the primary school level, there
were only two French language high schools out of perhaps a dozen and
a half, neither of which were run by the public school board and hence
had to charge quite steep tuition.  If you wanted to go to high school
in Sudbury you pretty much had to speak English, and indeed had to
speak it as well as those whose mother tongue was English since there
were no special considerations given.  I don't think it is any easier
for a French-speaking person to learn English as a second language than
it is for an English-speaking person to learn French, so the recent
postings may give you some idea of what some of those guys were up
against.  To do as well as an English-speaking person, a French person
would have to work a whole lot harder.  This is in a city where the
majority was likely French.

I liked French, and could usually keep up with and contribute to a
conversation about last Friday's football game, or girls, or whatever
people talked about.  I couldn't have written (or spoken) a completely
grammatically correct sentence if my life depended on it, but then
again neither could a lot of those guys.  In either language.  It was
kind of hard to get a proper, consistant education if you were French.

Even at the time I could remember being conscious enough of the problem
to wonder how the heck some of the old guys who lived out in the valley
and maybe didn't speak a lot of English got along.  How could they
go to court to fight a speeding ticket, or dispute their water bill,
or obtain government services, or even get a phone number that wasn't
in the book?  I don't think this was particularly just, yet a French
person who made any noises about "rights" was likely ignored.  Speak
English, we don't understand you and aren't going to make an effort
to try.  The English in Montreal had it very, very good in comparison
to the French in Sudbury.

Sudbury has changed a lot since.  The place looks bilingual.  You can count
on getting service in French if you want it, both from the government
and, usually, from private business.  English parents fight to get their
kids into French immersion schools.  There are publicly supported French
language secondary schools, the number of which probably matches the
linguistic distribution of the population there more reasonably.  Sudbury
has become more like Montreal.

I guess during the same period Montreal has become more like Sudbury
was.  With great cries about the violation of the "rights" of the English,
and the racism of the French.  If the French in Quebec are Nazis I can't
imagine what we were in Sudbury 20 years ago.  Of course I don't believe
that one corrects an injustice with another injustice, but this is
not an ideal world and in the real world one often reaps what one sows.
And I can't help but feel that maybe the English in Quebec are now
harvesting what was planted by the English outside (and inside) Quebec
20 or 30 or more years ago.

As a consequence of this I am happy to see postings in French and will
make the effort to read them if I am interested in the contents, no
matter how inconvenient this might be to me.  Learning two languages is
always more inconvenient then learning one, more time consuming.  Reading,
or writing, or saying something in your second language is always more
inconvenient than your first language.  Why, then, should people whose
first language is French be asked to suffer more inconvenience than I am
willing to bear myself?  You can ask them to do this, and you might have
all sorts of good, logical reasons why they should, but I wouldn't expect
this to make a big impression.

What goes around comes around.

Dennis Ferguson
University of Toronto