From: benali@alcor.concordia.ca ( ILYESS B. BDIRA )
Newsgroups: can.jobs,soc.culture.french
Subject: Re: Student relocation & employment in Canada
Date: 3 Jan 93 16:07:37 GMT
Followup-To: can.jobs
Distribution: can

Sandra_Warner@mindlink.bc.ca (Sandra Warner) writes:

>> >
>> >1) Noone is allowed to send their children to English schools in Quebec
>> >   unless they were educated in English in Canada! :-((((((
>>
>>    If people move to France, Germany, Japan, etc. and use their public
>> school system, they won't have much choice either.

Not when 35% of the people speack another language (as is the case in 
Montreal)

>>
>>+  Sandy writes:
>>+ Then why is it that the rest of Canada would be considered "racist" if we
>>+ said only English was allowed in the public schools?  French Emersion in

In other parts of Canada, they don't have to have any laws, most people do
not speak French anyway.

>>+
>>+ That is boloney!!!  The rest of Canada is expected to learn both

Sorry but that is only in theory but in practice most anglophones do
not speak french (even in Quebec) while most literate francophones speak
both languages... So the francophones have good reasons to feel threatened.
>>
>>+
>>+ I have gone into stores in Quebec and If you don't speak french you are
>>+ ignored!  Even when the clerks understand English perfectly well.  I had

This is not such a bad incident, there are worse examples..
Your incident reminds me of a funny  situation I have been in: I was in the
airport in Rome and I asked a security person about the information desk,
I speack no Italian so I asked first in English: " Can you please tell me
where the INFORMATION desk is?.... INFORMATION? (he said something in Italian
That mad it clear that he undestood no English, so I said "Information, SVP?
(in French).. Same answer.. 
Knowing how Italian usually sounds (:-)), I guessed "Informationi?.."  Well
it was good enough, because he gave me the directions..

In Quebec, there is less racism IMHO than in Europe, but it still exists.
What bothers me more is the fact that Xenophobia is more allowed and even
encouraged by the media while it is just as bad.  Xenophobia usually surfaces
during bad economic conditions (see Germany, France, Belgium, and others..)
It is usually part of ignorance, and it is immoral for the politicians to
use that ignorance and even fuel it for political gains.
Still, they do it all the time.

I think that the Francophones have the right to protect their language, but
I resent the fact that France was the first one who fueled the Quebec
conflict when Charles DeGaulle came here and  encouraged Quebec nationalism.

I resent more the fact that the French support all the laws that are
in favor of the French language in Quebec while they protest similar 
laws in their former colonies (the most recent was Algeria) 
where the only difference is that the French language is on the losing end.

I support Francophonization in Quebec and Arabization in Algeria.. Anybody who
supports one and opposes the other is a hypocrite.

I live in Quebec, I prefer to use English, but have no problem switching
to French anytime of the day, I send my daughter to a French school, but
we watch T.V in English most of the time, however I speack only Arabic
with my daughters.. I do not know what the end result will be, but it seems
that my children will be trilingual with a preference to Arabic in their
daily life.
Newsgroups: can.jobs