Setting aside the legalistic objections, which are large and decisive …
It’s 22% of Canadians, but roughly 85% of Quebeckers who speak good French and barely 5% of Quebeckers who cannot converse in basic French at all.
Were the francophones scattered evenly across the entire Canadian population, @DrDeth’s idea to tell 1 in 5 people in each and every town to go pound sand might work. When it’s instead darn near everyone in a big concentrated blob, well, the reaction is going to be rather different.
See here for more. I can’t vouch for the article, but it seems to this layman to be carefully written.
Old Supreme Court rulings were written in English, and French lawyers are completely befuddled by them. They have no idea what they say, and have no way of finding out.
Therefore, the solution is to – at least temporarily – make them unavailable to everyone.
I have a better idea. The British won the Battle of the Plains of Abraham in 1759 and the French have been whining about it for 265 years. Maybe it’s time for them to admit that they lost, and move on.
That’s an excellent point. If those rulings are indeed translated into modern French, then some anglophone-rights group should sue the Registrar of the Supreme Court of Canada for giving the Frenchies an advantage. I don’t know if there’s an anglophone-rights group, but there certainly ought to be considering how blatantly and openly the English-speaking population is discriminated against in Quebec, even as the French-speaking minority is obsequiously catered to throughout the rest of Canada. Also, see above regarding who won and who lost on the Plains of Abraham.
Or as Dave Barry put it, the French and English have learned, after centuries of peaceful coexistence on the great land that they shared, to hate each other.
The 1763 Treaty of Paris offered the French to retain their North American possessions (Quebec, Louisiana (east of the Mississippi), etc.), but they decided to give them up and take the Caribbean islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique. They felt that the island’s sugar was worth a lot more than the “quelques arpents de neige” in North America.