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Français go home, says Toronto

May 23, 2008 – 2:02 pm | Posted in On the Net, Opinion, Web design

RadCan’s Sur le Web makes an interesting point (I’d link to the post directly, but I can’t) today about the Tourism Toronto website (which should probably be called the Toronto Tourism site considering its URL, but who am I to judge?) that was featured in a recent Globe and Mail article about the increase in domestic tourism to the city.

Tourism Toronto doesn’t have a French version.

It took me about five minutes to find the links to different language versions (they’re on the bottom of the page), in the form of flags for different countries under the banner “international sites.” There’s a Chinese version, a Korean version, a Japanese version and a Spanish version. But no French. (Incidentally, there are flags for Spain and Argentina which link to TorontoTourismMexico.com, which I’m sure isn’t going to offend anyone, right?).

I haven’t asked the site’s creators what their motives are, because that’s no fun. So let’s speculate about them here. Did they forget? Are Korean tourists more valuable than French ones? Is there some other website for francophone Canadian tourists? Are they trying to get back at us for winning the bagel war?

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The reasonable accommodation debate begins again

May 17, 2008 – 4:41 pm | Posted in In the news, Media

The Gazette’s Jeff Heinrich today has an OMGEXCLUSIVE!!!!11 on the salient facts that will make their way into the Bouchard-Taylor Commission report. It’s in a bunch of parts:

  • The main story, which boils down the conclusions to: learn about immigrants (especially Muslims) and be nice to them; and learn more English
  • A list of common fallacies in arguments against accommodation
  • A sidebar on the need to learn more English, which will no doubt be interpreted not as “we need to be more multilingual like world-leading countries” but as “we need to surrender to the unilingual anglos who will enslave us”
  • Some comments from members of the commission not named Bouchard or Taylor
  • Criticisms from UQAM prof and commission adviser Jacques Beauchemin, calling the report a “whitewash”

There’s also a piece noting that Taylor has been named one of the world’s top 100 public thinkers, an editorial praising the commissioners, a soundoff forum for people’s comments, and a post-publication reaction story from the premier (he’s not saying anything) and others, including Mouvement Montréal français (I won’t spoil the surprise)

I don’t know how Heinrich obtained the parts of the report he bases his stories on (maybe he found them in a cab?), but I’m sure plenty of ink will be spilled noting that it was the anglo paper that got the scoop on a commission report that says we should learn English.

Meanwhile, my bosses are (insert disgusting metaphor for happiness here) that the competition is all over talking about their scoop (it was even in Le Monde!). Patrick Lagacé blogs about it (and the comments give a pretty good idea of why this commission was needed in the first place). Maisonneuve also has (coincidentally) a story about the commission from yesterday.

My take

Anyone who expected the commission report to magically solve the issue is clearly fooling themselves. It simply won’t do that. So then the question becomes what we spent all that money on. Was it just a chance for people from the régions to vent about immigrants they’ve never met? Or was it something to clearly define what the issues are so we can slowly work through them? Either way, expect a lot of people to be angry.

And anger is what the commission brought out more than anything else. It made racism, xenophobia and all sorts of discrimination acceptable and normal by allowing people a forum to express it.

As the Habs riot showed us, crowds are like children. Without proper discipline, they revert to the intelligence of an infant.

This problem isn’t unique to Quebec. The U.S. has the same issue with immigration: the media and politicians practice open discrimination, and that makes it acceptable for everyone else to do the same.

One of the knee-jerk reactions we’ve already seen is that francophones are the ones expected to do the accommodating while anglos don’t have to change. I don’t think that’s the point. Anglos already have to learn French here, otherwise they won’t get jobs in public service (outside of Fairview anyway). Statistics show that those who are bilingual make far more than their unilingual counterparts, anglo or franco. So the solution is to make sure both language groups get education in both languages, no?

I think there’s an even more fundamental issue that wasn’t explored here, and one that would have pissed francophone activists off more than anything else: Is it still in our best interest as a world society to preserve minority languages? So many conflicts can be boiled down to communication difficulties, and so many of those can be boiled down to translation problems. What would be so bad if the entire world spoke just one language, whether it be English, French, Latin, Esperanto or Mandarin?

And what about the media?

The commission thinks it went a bit far, and the media will no doubt disagree. I think the real answer (as always) lies somewhere in between. The media (especially tabloids like the Journal) overhyped the issue, which is a large reason why people who have no real connection with immigrants became so frightened. On the other hand, the media only serve to reflect society, and there was clearly some latent xenophobia there to exploit.

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Anglo ads on franco websites?

March 26, 2008 – 6:08 pm | Posted in Media, Opinion

Perhaps it’s just a coincidence, but some astute francophone bloggers are noting English-only advertisements on French-language websites like Cyberpresse and Le Devoir.

Assuming it’s not a technical malfunction or clueless advertising agency, should it be a scandal that an ad on a French-language website be in English? A lot of anglophones read French newspapers, watch French television and go to French websites when they can’t find what they need in English. Why not put forward some ads that cater to them?

For example: If The Gazette put a TV ad on RDS during a Habs game to promote its Habs Inside/Out website, in order to reach anglophone Habs enthusiasts who can’t watch the game on another network, or francophone fanatiques who want to immerse themselves in everything about Les Glorieux, would that be so bad?

Or if an anglophone school board had ads in French promoting… oh wait, they already did that. And people are pissed.

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Bilingual doesn’t mean French at Carleton

March 25, 2008 – 2:24 pm | Posted in Media, Opinion

In a move sure to piss off francophones from coast to coast, Carleton University’s journalism department has decided that students no longer have to demonstrate a proficiency in French to graduate. (via J-Source)

Considering that half the summer interns The Gazette picks every year come from Carleton (the other half tend to come from Concordia), this seems like a bad idea.

As Graham Fraser, Canada’s official languages commissioner, points out, this isn’t just about journalists working in Quebec. Even those in Victoria will occasionally have to find themselves translating French text into English to understand a story better.

Carleton’s reasoning, and I suppose it’s understandable to a point, is that many students choose to work elsewhere (like outside the country) when they graduate. And many of those students come from elsewhere in the first place. They have no use for French.

But if that’s the reasoning, why bother having language proficiency at all? They require students to have a basic understanding of English and now another language of their choice. What’s the point if not to have the proper skills to practice journalism in Canada? Should learning about Canadian libel law also be optional for people who expect to work overseas?

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Stupid

March 15, 2008 – 3:06 am | Posted in Media, Montreal

From Barry Wilson’s CTV News Postscript blog:

WHAT WAS THAT LINE FROM FOREST GUMP?
STUPID IS AS STUPID DOES.
SO YOU HAVE THESE IDIOTS FROM SOME COCKAMAMIE SEPARATIST GROUP THREATENING TO TRY TO JOIN IN ON SUNDAY’S ST PATRICK’S DAY PARADE
THEY COMPLAIN THE PARADE IS TOO ENGLISH.
SO? THERE POINT IS?

Ad hominem attacks on language issues are always best done with blatant grammatical errors in your mother tongue.

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Livre de visage

March 8, 2008 – 7:08 pm | Posted in Technology

Facebook est en français.

Happy now?

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The McKibbin’s kinda-non-story

February 16, 2008 – 3:04 pm | Posted in Business, In the news, Media, Montreal, Opinion, Quebec politics

I should give fair play to Jamie Orchard. My last post about her blog was unflattering. But her latest post, about the whole McKibbin’s language-police debacle, is much more interesting:

The OLF insists that all the owner has to do is write back and explain that the signs are artifacts. In fact, when the OLF saw our TV footage of the signs, they said right away the case could be solved easily – here’s the quote from Gerald Paquette:

There are many Irish pubs in Quebec that have these kinds of artifacts and they have all asked for an exception.”

We told this to the owner of the pub on Thursday, and he seemed relieved. But then, on Friday, the co-owner of the pub was on talk radio insisting that he would have to go to court to fight this, making a big show of inviting the premier to his pub to look at the signs, insisting he would refuse to pay the fine. He was getting all the sympathy in the world from the host, from the callers, from everyone, and never once did he mention it could all be solved with a simple letter.

I like this post (especially compared to the previous one) for two reasons:

  1. It’s a simple, rational, thought-out opinion rather than an uninformed reactionary “stupid OLF” rant
  2. It brings some new information to the table (Global’s conversation with the bar’s owner) that is perfectly placed in a journalist’s blog.

I’m not going to leave the OLF (actually the OQLF) off the hook entirely, since they did, in fact, bring up these signs in their complaint (which was from a customer who said he wasn’t served in French and an outdoor menu was in English only).

But it’s clear the media (and I have to include myself here, since I edited the big article in Friday’s Gazette about it) played up the signs and outrage campaign while burying the other complaints and the comments from the OQLF that they could easily get an exemption. (Second-day stories are pointing these things out, but that wouldn’t have been necessary if they weren’t buried in the first place.)

And McKibbin’s owners are clearly using this as an excuse to launch an anti-OQLF publicity campaign to boost anglo business and line their pockets with outrage money (or just get their name in the news). They’ve already got a Facebook group. And another. And another. And another. And another.

Elsewhere in the blogosphere:

UPDATE (Feb. 27): A video on YouTube shows the original letter from the OQLF to McKibbin’s, which clearly is much more about the posters than the office later suggested to reporters. Also plenty of discussion on some franco forums.

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Anglos really do speak French

January 29, 2008 – 11:18 pm | Posted in Media, Montreal, Quebec politics

The Gazette’s Andy Riga does a reverse Journal: going to anglo areas and seeing if they serve him in French. Sure enough, most of them do.

This is to contrast the Journal’s assertion that it’s hard to be served in French in Montreal, something The Gazette had previously decried as irresponsible journalism.

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When 90% just isn’t good enough

January 19, 2008 – 7:23 pm | Posted in Business, In the news, Quebec politics

Here’s another stupid idea: Giving small business tax credits for speaking French, something they’re supposed to be doing anyway.

How do you accurately judge something like that without doubling the size of the language police?

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C’est la fin du français!

January 19, 2008 – 2:20 am | Posted in Media, Quebec politics

Bon, garde ça: un article dans Le Devoir en anglais. J’ai jamais vu ça dans ma vie.

Sadly, it reverts to French later on, and I don’t understand the point in either language.

Also, Mme Bombardier seems to think that bilingual Quebecers are all francophones who have adopted English as opposed to anglophones who have adopted French.

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Journal does it again

January 16, 2008 – 3:27 am | Posted in Media, Montreal, Opinion, Quebec politics, Slow News Day

The Journal de Montréal has a … let’s call it a talent, for creating news with its investigations. Usually it involves a reporter going undercover, tricking a group of people into doing something they shouldn’t and then proudly writing an exposé about the whole topic.

And it gets everyone talking. People chat about it on the bus (as I heard this week), other newspapers comment on it and run follow-ups, and politicians react with promises to deal with the situation somehow.

The latest one involves a young reporter going out and pretending to be a unilingual anglophone while applying for jobs. Despite telling them she speaks no usable French, about 15% of them agree to hire her. Rather than focus on the 85% who thought that not knowing enough French was reason enough not to hire someone with experience during the busy Christmas rush, they proclaim that anglophones have it easy here, even in such predominantly French areas as the Plateau. (Really? The Plateau?)

There’s also a video with the journalist in question which basically has her explain what she did and what the legal implications are (apparently, none). Though she proclaims to be able to speak English without a noticeable accent, she didn’t give an example during the video, which would have been nice.

Like most of these pieces, there is a certain amount of legitimate public interest and a certain amount of needless sensationalism involved here. You really don’t need to know that much in either language to work at a coffee shop, especially in Montreal where most people are bilingual. The Gazette points out that the 85% who denied her employment because of her language is more interesting, while denouncing the whole idea as the kind of journalism “we do not need.”

At the same time, I think a lot of the criticism comes from people who compete with or just don’t like the Journal. Had La Presse done the same experiment and treated it with less sensationalism, their reactions would probably have been different. The ability of people to be served in their own language is a legitimate public concern, even if it seems nobody actually ran into problems here.
Either way, now the issue is out of the hands of the media and in the hands of the hot-button reactionary provincial politicians who would bathe in giant buckets of horse manure if they thought it would win them votes in swing ridings.

Let’s hope they don’t go overboard on a minor issue like this.

UPDATE (Jan. 17): Affiliation Quebec says they’re filing a complaint with the Quebec Press Council:

That the Journal de Montreal, in it’s (sic) front page expose on January 14, 2008, intended to inflame the already tender sensibilities of Quebec’s political and social balance, by acting as an “agent provocateur”, in its worst sense.

As a leading daily newspaper, Journal de Montreal has acted in an irresponsible and reckless manner by featuring an article of questionable news value, placed in a position where the editors knew a maelstrom would ensue.

Further, the story’s headline is quite unrelated to the subject of the material, and fails, in any way, to prove that customers are unable to be served in French.

Gosh, to think the Journal would be so bold as to print an article that provokes public debate on a controversial topic. Those bastards.

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Bilingualism isn’t a threat to Quebec

December 16, 2007 – 7:03 pm | Posted in Blogosphere, Media, Montreal, Opinion, Quebec politics

Chris DeWolf emailed me about this blog post on the two solitudes from Voir’s François Parenteau. In it, he argues that anglos are zombies (then he argues that we’re not zombies) and that we’re coming to get francophones so we can enslave them, or other such nonsense:

Et c’est vrai aussi que, d’un point de vue strictement francophone, les anglophones sont des morts-vivants. Ils sont vivants, en ce sens qu’ils marchent, travaillent, mangent, dorment, votent et font des enfants. Mais comme ils font tout ça en anglais, ils sont morts au regard de la communauté francophone. Ils ne créeront jamais rien en français. Ils ne consommeront aucun produit culturel en français. Ils ne retireront rien et n’amèneront rien à la sphère culturelle francophone. Ils la “compétitionnent” même avec la leur propre, indépendante, nourrie à même la culture majoritaire de ce zombie-land qu’est l’Amérique du Nord. Et pire encore, on le sait, ils transforment automatiquement en zombie les francophones avec qui ils entrent en contact. Il n’y a qu’à voir les communautés francophones hors-Québec pour s’en rendre compte.

My problem isn’t that he’s paranoid, or that he spews vitriolic hatred and xenophobia, painting hundreds of millions of people with one gigantic brush. My problem is how familiar this kind of language is, leading people to believe that such opinions are valid.

I wonder if I should even point out that the entire premise for the post is wrong. He says census data shows that French is the mother tongue of less than 50% of Montrealers (which is true), and that this is because of an increase in the number of English speakers. A quick look at the census data shows that almost all the change in percentages comes because of an increase in immigration and the number of allophones (who speak neither language at home). What’s more, a majority of these immigrants to Quebec are choosing French over English for the first time.

Of course, facts are irrelevant. What matters is what’s in his gut. And the irrational fear is there. Just like Americans think they’re going to get swarmed by illegal Mexican immigrants and have to speak Spanish, people like Parenteau think there’s an organized anglo conspiracy to rid Quebec of the French language, and that the percentage of francophones, now around 80% province-wide, will drop to zero.

I’m not suggesting that being surrounded by a population 50 times your size doesn’t put a melting pot pressure. It does, though nowhere near as big as alarmists make it out to be. And the shrinking population of francophones outside Quebec should be of concern as well to anyone who wants this country to promote bilingualism.

But it’s not equivalent to South African apartheid, as one commenter (who wants everyone to know he has a bachelor’s degree) suggested.

Facebook and YouTube have to change

Parenteau points to the English-only Facebook as an example of the assimilation of francophones into anglophonia. I think it’s annoying that Facebook is only now considering creating versions of itself in other languages. YouTube, which launched an English-only Canadian site despite already having translated versions, is even moreso.

But the blame for this should rest on Facebook and YouTube, not anglophones in general. And the suggestion that francophones should boycott these sites (yeah, good luck with that) is exactly how it should be dealt with.

Blaming anglos doesn’t solve anything

Even if we ignore all of that, the fact remains that Parenteau and company don’t put forward any serious solutions for the problem of “zombies” eating their brains. Some suggest sovereignty, which wouldn’t stop Quebecers from using Facebook, nor would it make French more common elsewhere in Canada. Restrictive legislation like Bill 101 just makes companies look for loopholes, which is why Momma’s Pizza House is now Maison de Pizza Maman but Burger King is still Burger King. Boycotts and popular campaigns don’t work.

And most importantly, blaming all us anglos for the problem and calling us names won’t do a thing for the cause. It’s not going to make us all run away to Toronto or start speaking French. It’s just going to get us riled up and start writing blog posts.

But I’m not going to stoop to François Parenteau’s level. I’m not going to pretend like he represents the majority of francophones. I know better than to suggest that 80% of Quebec’s population are ignorant xenophobes who want to rid the world of everyone who isn’t like them.

Why aren’t we happy with bilingualism?

Montreal is the most bilingual city in North America. It’s a place where it’s not uncommon to find people switching languages in mid-sentence. But rather than embrace that, the two solitudes are at each other’s throats. Yes, that means we have some unilingual anglophones, but they represent less than 5% of the population. Is this really the end of the world? The alien invasion? The apocalypse?

We should be celebrating the fact that we can speak two languages here. We should be promoting it as an economic strength. Instead, we have people like François Parenteau who believe refusing to speak another language makes him a better person.

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Census data doesn’t show anything new

December 6, 2007 – 2:05 am | Posted in Media, Montreal, Multiculturalism, Slow News Day, West Island

As you might expect, the media went crazy over reports from the 2006 census that the percentage of francophones has dropped and the percentage of anglophones is up slightly for the first time in three decades.

The numbers are hardly staggering. The number of Quebecers who speak French at home is still over 80%.

The West Island Chronicle breaks down the West Island numbers, though it does so in prose so it’s hard to tell what’s actually going on. Basically, the West Island is following the trend, with little difference in anglo/franco ratios but a big jump in allophones through immigration.

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Freed, your mind

November 18, 2007 – 5:02 pm | Posted in Media, Quebec politics

La Presse’s Rima Elkouri has an interview with Gazette columnist Josh Freed, who’s promoting his new documentary about the sex trade in China.

But the interview isn’t about that. It’s about his thoughts on Quebec’s two solitudes, Pauline Marois and the province’s obsession with Nous.

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TWIM: Anglos, poutine and a gypsy

November 17, 2007 – 5:35 pm | Posted in Blogosphere, Montreal, My articles, Quebec politics

This week’s blog is Gypsy Bandito (and the Magic Flying Media Machine) by CT Moore, a social media marketing and other buzzwords-type person. His posts mainly take the form of videos of him thinking out loud while walking down the street, holding a video camera at his face. Others might think him insane, but we know better. (UPDATE: He just resigned from his job… so repeat previous sentence.)

This week’s Justify Your Existence is Gary Shapiro, a spokesperson for the Office québécois de la langue anglaise, the anglo rights group that is fighting for bilingual commercial signs. They launched last week and got quite a bit of media attention. They also ran this ad in the Suburban and Gazette on Wednesday:

OQLA: Help save the English language

My first question to Shapiro: “Is this a joke?” didn’t go over well. Though the name is a parody of the OQLF, the issues the group raises are apparently very serious.

(UPDATE: The West Island Chronicle does an informal survey of large stores and shopping malls to see what languages their signs are in. TVA also has a video report on the group, with the journalist talking to the OQLF, Mouvement Montréal Français, Gilles Proulx and just about every pundit he could talk to except Shapiro or another member of his group — no mention is made of an attempt to contact the OQLA to have them explain themselves.)

Finally, there’s also a Bluffer’s Guide on the history of Poutine. It may or may not have turned 50 this year, depending on whose story you believe. While the media tout the story of Fernand Lachance inventing it in Warwick in 1957, one restaurant proclaims it was the birthplace of the dish.

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Future Shop needs translators

November 16, 2007 – 5:53 pm | Posted in Business, Humour

From Blog Story comes this hilariously awful translation on Future Shop’s website:

Obtenir commencé - Future Shop

Yes, folks, they translated “get started” into “obtenir commencé”.

UPDATE (Nov. 22): A representative of Future Shop responds below (Comment #5, basically a cut-and-paste of what he sent Pat Lagacé), blaming a U.S.-based subcontractor for the bad translation job. He says the link to this page has been removed (in both languages) and the company has been asked to fix it.

I tried to send a message to the company (iGo Digital out of Indianapolis, IN). But when I filled out their contact form (the only electronic way to reach them), I got this:

Server object error ‘ASP 0177 : 800401f3′

Server.CreateObject Failed

/contact.asp, line 15

800401f3

It really inspires confidence.

Blaming subcontractors is becoming a more common tactic for big companies, I notice. It absolves them of responsibility when those subcontractors cut corners. If the error is bad enough, they just cut ties with the company and find a new one.

I don’t doubt that an Indiana-based technology company would fail horribly at translating a web page (apparently resorting to some sort of automated translation). But why doesn’t Future Shop have proofreaders? Surely someone there must have at least looked at the page in question before it went live?

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Anglo myths exposed

November 12, 2007 – 12:31 am | Posted in Montreal, Quebec politics

Montreal philosopher Pierre Desjardins has an article in Quebec City’s Le Soleil about how horrible Montreal is. It’s getting some reaction from defensive anglo Montrealers who object to his suggestions that Westmount anglos control everything.

That, combined with some comments on Patrick Lagacé’s blog about the Office québécois de la langue anglaise has forced me to conclude that there are many unilingual francophones who need some education about the other solitude.

So as a public service, I’m going to dispel some myths concerning the Maudit Anglais (in a language that its targetted audience won’t understand, just to be ironic). Though there may be some anglos who fit these descriptions, they aren’t the majority.

Read More »

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Angryphones and frangryphones

November 8, 2007 – 7:57 pm | Posted in Activism, Media, Montreal, Quebec politics, Slow News Day

CBC has a story about a new protest by French-superiority groups Impératif français and Mouvement Montréal français: They want to change when “For English, press 9″ appears on government-run automatic telephone menus.

As it stands, many government departments have it at the beginning of their menus, so that anglphones don’t have to sit through French options they don’t understand. But the French groups want the option to be read only at the end of the French menus.

I honestly have no words to express how stupid this is. Arguing over automatic telephone menu orders is trivial enough, but what exactly are they trying to accomplish? Save time for francophones who have to endure that two-second delay? Help anglophones learn French by forcing them to sit through menu options?

No, this is just a pointless power grab and pissing contest. And unfortunately for us, the government actually listened. So if you have to wait through a five-minute list of menu options before finding out what number to press to get English service, you know who to blame.

Shouldn’t journalists correct wrong information?

During the CBC News at Six report on this scandal, it featured a few man-on-the-street soundbites from Montrealers about the issue. Naturally, the people interviewed said what the journalists could not: That this is a stupid issue to focus on and people should get a life.

But one of the interviewees defended the English language (because in Quebec, English needs a defence), saying it was the most commonly-spoken language in the world.

Of course, as any knower-of-pointless-facts would tell you, that’s incorrect. Mandarin (Chinese), with over a billion speakers, is spoken by more than twice as many people as English (which is second or third with over 300-500 million, depending on your source). French is ranked in the teens with 130 million (60 million natively).

But this apparent misinformation went uncorrected by the journalist. Why? Did she not know this (in which case, why didn’t she confirm it?), or are statements from random people on the street not subject to the same fact-checking treatment as those from journalists?

Quebec Office of the English Language

Another thing mentioned on the CBC evening news today was the creation of the Office québécois de la langue anglaise, a bad joke grass-roots English rights group that hopes to pressure businesses into providing bilingual services. Considering the word “racism” appears on their forum, you can guess what kind of people this website is attracting. No doubt it will serve to hurt its cause more than it helps, by propagating the angryphone stereotype.

(UPDATE: Patrick Lagacé and his commenters have some things to say about this new group)

UPDATE (Nov. 10): We should send the Anglo Rights Brigade to Laval University, where it seems they’re clearly needed.

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YouTube Canada is pointless and insulting

November 6, 2007 – 8:42 pm | Posted in Video

YouTube exploited the media’s cluelessness about the Internet to get some free advertising launched its Canadian site today, with a big press release and everything.

YouTube, an American video-sharing website, was not available to Canadian Internet users prior to today. Internet traffic would be stopped at the border, searched, and then forced to pay taxes and duties before being allowed to continue. As a result, no Canadian-made videos had ever appeared on the No. 1 video-sharing site.

Oh wait, none of that is true? Then what’s the purpose again?

“YouTube Canada”, which looks exactly like regular YouTube except that its featured content is from obviously-Canadian sources, is basically nothing more than a bunch of content licensing agreements with media outlets like Dose.ca (funny they don’t use CanWest’s crappy internal video portal), the Canadian Football League, CBC and others. You’ll note that these groups already have YouTube channels, which just makes the pointlessness of this launch even more apparent.

The Globe and Mail’s Mathew Ingram was one of the few not to be taken in by the smoke and mirrors. He asks, very reasonably, what the point of a “localized” Canadian site is in the first place. (His remarks remind me a bit of Casey McKinnon’s views on CanCon.)

One thing that Ingram didn’t mention though, is a mistake a lot of these companies make when they create Canadian versions of themselves: The “Canadian” YouTube is English-only.

It’s not that YouTube lacks translation abilities. YouTube France is in French. So what’s the story?

Don’t get me wrong. I’m no Guy Bertrand or anything. But to launch a website branded as “Canadian” in only one of its languages is a pretty big “Fuck You” to francophone Canadians.

So colour me underwhelmed about all this.

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BTK: Bertrand Targets Koivu

October 30, 2007 – 3:53 pm | Posted in Canadiens, In the news, Montreal, Quebec politics

Guy Bertrand, the lovable lawyer and rabble-rouser, has finally shown his face in front of The Commission, and shown what a hero he is by clearing up once and for all what the greatest threat is to the French language and Québécois culture:

Saku Koivu: Menace to société

Saku Koivu.

You see, because the Finnish player who happens to be the captain of the Montreal Canadiens has trouble with his third language, he’s violating our rights by not allowing hockey fans to be served in French.

When Koivu is inevitably found guilty in a court of law for crimes against humanity, should we subject him to lethal injection, the electric chair or just force him to be a panelist on Tout le monde en parle?

UPDATE (Nov. 1): Gazette letter-writers come to their captain’s defence and let Bertrand have it. La Presse’s André Pratte points out that anglophones, not francophones, are in linguistic danger in Quebec, and François Gagnon has some good insight into the matter.

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