Bilingual Mississippi Mills

Official bilingualism remains an inoperative failure, a bitterly divisive faux structure that benefits a few and disincentivizes many more, particularly through the social insensitivity of its application. It may have seemed, in a cursory initial view, like a solution to the incendiary grievances of the French-speaking population that their rights within the larger English-speaking Canada were impaired, but it has turned out to be a white elephant of fire-breathing proportions.

Bilingualism purportedly represents the historical reality of an original foundation of the country, where the French and the British settled on the backs of a much longer-established aboriginal population. If we can be complacent about that, while struggling to manifestly live up to our collective responsibility to those whom we displaced from the land, why cannot we have simply laid to rest the fiction that each language had equal place in the political and social structure of the country?

And if official bilingualism, once it became a reality in law, was not able to figure out that where minority populations exist it should be incumbent upon them to learn to use the majority language the better to prepare themselves for integration at all levels, while still honouring their original language if they so desired, we were set up for failure from the inception, of Canada as a two-language country. If a province like Quebec chooses to be effectively unilingual, that is their choice, as a majority French-language entity.

It is exceedingly bureaucratically cumbersome, too dreadfully expensive, too socially irritating, and above all utterly insane to select language over capability, experience, expertise, professionalism, when filling critical government positions. The policy effectively creates further divisions and a backlash of resentment. The backwardness of the official bilingualism policy is all too evident with public servants forced to manage a language they seldom use in a practical setting.

And the absurdity of a postmistress in a municipality which is strictly English-speaking, where the only French-language requests have come from those who covertly entrap the unilingual speaker by presenting themselves as legitimate customers to build their case for dismissal is pathetic. But then, there are many French speakers who feel entitled to service in the language of their choice, whether or not they incidentally also speak passable English.

This is emblematic of those who feel themselves to have been victimized, a not-too-subtle form of civil revenge, history re-written and a hollow victory achieved. And the bureaucrats who administer the bilingual programs and are assertively determined to observe the very letter of the law have fired Jeanne Barr, postmistress in the town of Pakenham, more than adequately demonstrating how often the law is an ass.