if Canada allegedly discriminates against non-French speakers, did upper IQ cohort try learn it?

I am referring to this article Beware Bilingualism! The Catastrophic Canadian Case | Articles | VDARE.com that claims that it’s a lot easier to get government jobs, political appointments and some other public service jobs for bilingual people fluent in French. Assuming that such discrimination is accomplished through impartial “meritocratic” verification of language proficiency and not through personal prejudice of the hiring manager (as might be the case in America with Hispanic managers) why don’t the more intelligent / higher learning ability non-Francophone young people just learn French to fluency? Is it a problem of lack of quality educational services for this purpose? Or a class divide where the smarter non-Francophones don’t aspire to jobs that require bilingualism while dumber ones cannot manage language study? Or is the hiring system explicitly discriminating on ethnic background regardless of objectively measured language skills?

Wait, what? “Bilingual people fluent in French”—if they’re bilingual, they’re also fluent in another language. English speakers can learn French just as easily as French speakers can learn English, and government bilingual positions go to native speakers of each language as well as people who grow up speaking both. I don’t really see how promoting bilinguals is an advantage to one group over the other.

There are so many unwarranted assumptions and leading questions in the OP that it is not suitable for GQ. Moving to GD.

Colibri
General Questions Moderator

I didn’t read that article but I don’t think it’s an IQ related thing. If you learn French outside of Quebec - no matter how much classroom training you have, your French will probably still sound shabby next to a native Quebecois. Lots of Quebecois know both English and French out of life’s necessity, but outside Quebec you can get by in English 24/7. As a result, people from Quebec “shine” more in a job setting when it comes to languages.

ok, perhaps I should start from a more specific question. How does the hiring system for bilingualism work? Do they use language proficiency tests? Or do they directly advantage people of the preferred ethnic background as measured by census record or French-sounding last name?

I note you’re citing to VDARE. You might want to reconsider anything you read at that site:

It’s possible you found an article that wasn’t written by one of the racist lunatics. Even so, their standards are not high.

The national government uses language proficiency tests. If the position you’re applying for requires bilingualism, you have to first pass language proficiency tests in your second language, which can be either English or French, obviously. Here’s the English language website:

and the French:

http://www.psc-cfp.gc.ca/sas-sde/ol-lo/tst-ex-fra.htm

There are three tests, one each of reading proficiency, writing proficiency, and oral proficiency.

Native francophones sort of have a slight advantage in this sort of thing, because more francophones tend to be bilingual than anglophones. The reason for that should be fairly obvious, if you think about it.

so that would suggest that for anglophone Canadians these tests should be (or could be?) sort of like TOEFL for Chinese in America. A high stakes test to cram for a few years in order to get onto the right education and career track.

BTW, I cannot figure out from this government website how the test is scored. Does it have several grades like an AP exam? Or is it scored on a curve, so that the native speakers of French could cluster on the right end, crowding out all but the best non-native learners?

ETA: no, actually it does say how it is graded http://www.psc-cfp.gc.ca/ppc-cpp/sle-els/top-tco-i-eng.htm

so sounds like the smart anglophones should cram until they can solidly score the Level C, right?

I’m not sure why you’re focusing on anglophones. The question is second language fluency, which is something that anglophones and francophones need to get one of these jobs. And, ideally, everybody wants to score a Level C, which is basically full, or functionally full fluency in the second language.

I’m not really sure what this means here. If you’re a native speaker of French, which is to say if French is your native language, then the second language test you take is a test in English. Somebody who grew up in Quebec, for instance, and never learned English, is going to fail his test just like somebody who grew up in Alberta and never knew French.

If you click on the link to the French language website, it includes sample questions of the English proficiency test. See?

http://www.psc-cfp.gc.ca/ppc-cpp/sle-els/rdng-test-cmp-ecrt-info-rens-fra.htm#exemples

Working with the Canadian government employees I saw that many could barely speak one language or the other. In the mid-80s the standards may have been different, but there was an internal effort to promote bi-lingual fluency to some degree. One French speaking Canadian who spoke very little English was happy to work with me. He was a partisan and didn’t want to converse in English with Canadians, but it was ok for me, I was an American, and we were supposed to speak English. This gave him the chance to brush up on his English skills to meet the internal standards.

Well, the article I linked to concentrates on anglophone dissatisfaction with the hiring preference for bilinguals, not mentioning any such dissatisfaction on the part of francophones. Also there are lots fluent non native speakers of English out there and “mastering English to fluency” is not usually considered an overly onerous demand. More like a very smart and useful thing to do careerwise.

It depends where you are. English is no harder or easier a language to learn than French is. Mastering French to fluency is no more or no less onerous than mastering English to fluency. And if you live in Longueuil, for instance, you’re probably never going to have to know English, any more than you’re going to have to know French if you live in Edmonton. And if you think there’s not any dissatisfaction with bilingualism in Quebec, then all I can say is that you’re not paying attention. You want quotes? I’ve got Camille Laurin, I’ve got Jacques Parizeau, I’ve got a bunch of quotes. Admittedly, Laurin and Parizeau are kind of extreme on the issue, but the bilingualism thing pisses people off on both sides.

Though, there are some places where knowing both languages may help a lot practically, such as Ottawa and Moncton.

Laurin was not too extreme to be elected to the National Assembly, get appointed to cabinet and get Bill 101 passed. Parzeau was not too extreme to be elected Premier and come within a hair’s breadth of winning a referendum to secede from Canada.

Language is a big divide in Canada for those who care about the issue. Recall that about 15 or 20 years ago some French-speaking nurses lost their jobs in Quebec because they were failing the French-language proficiency tests… Just like the English language tests in Ontario (allegedly) designed to weed out Oriental university applicants with poor English skills instead filtered out a lot of native english speakers.

French immersion (that’s french only school for english-speaking children, not throwing French people in the river) is extremely popular in english Canada. In some cases, it’s to give the precious darlings a head start and a chance at better jobs; in other cases, it’s because you have to show ability to get in, so it means a class with less riff-raff and stupid kids to drag down the quality of instruction.

Thw whole French v English thing contains elements of paranoia and power struggle on both sides. The radical thinking in paranoid English circles is that starting with Trudeau, the french were conspiring to take over Ottawa and “force french down our throats” (common phrase of the time). Proof was that even corn flakes boxes were in French, and you could no longer get a job with the government unless you spoke French (a severe exaggeration).

On the Quebec side were people who grew up with a chip on their shoulder, convinced that the English were determined to put them down and dominate the province and country, relegate them to second class citizens, that separation is the only option. See Pierre Vallières - Wikipedia for the sort of stuff at the extreme.

Now that most people ahve grown up with the status quo, the last few referendums failed, and it’s hard to argue in Quebec that the ENglish are dominating and repressing them, I would say except for the die-hard fanatics the issue is greeted with a big yawn. During the last (close) referendum the general atttude I saw in English Canada was “make up your mind, go or stay, but understand what it’s going to cost you”.

The federal government debt at the time was about 600 billion dollars, and somehow this had been warped by separatist propaganda during the referendum debate - I saw a (French) man in the street interview where the guy was convinced if Quebec seceded, Canada would have to pay Quebec 150 billion, not the other way around. Similarly, Quebec joined Canada without Ungava or the James Bay area; those territories were given to it later by the feds. Suggestions by Indians in those areas that they had the right to separate from Quebec and join Canada in the event of a breakup were widely condemned by the Quebec separatists, with logic like “you can’t break up the territorial integrity of Quebec, it’s just not conceivable.”

Only a portion of the civil service jobs are designated bilingual, and there’s a whole (extra) bureaucracy in place to manage the situation.

They weren’t, which shows how strong the hostility to bilingualism was among certain elements of the Francophone community.

As I recall, those tests did exactly what they were designed to do: identify those applicants whose written English skills were not up to what was expected of a university student. It didn’t matter whether the applicant’s first language was English or not, or where the applicant came from. There was a large concern at the time (late 1970s) that high schools were turning out graduates who could not construct a grammatically-correct sentence, and these tests were the university system’s response.

It was in the late 1970s that I wrote one of those things (in fact, I wrote the first one ever given, in 1979), but I also recall that nobody was denied admission to the university because they failed the test. They were admitted, but had to write another, similar test at a later date. If they failed that one, they were sent for remedial help, and tested again. I seem to recall that it was entirely possible that due to the time necessary for retesting and remedial help, a student could get through most, if not all, of their first year–at which point, if they had the grades to continue with second-year studies, they did.

An anecdote with a bit of irony, given the topic of this thread: One of my university classmates in those days was from Vietnam–he was one of the late-1970s boat people. His English was barely adequate, but his French was flawless. He failed the English proficiency test the first couple of times, but the remedial help he received worked and he finally passed. Even if he had failed though, he probably would have been allowed to continue–he was getting top marks in all his French-language classes (which were most of his classes).

To add some detail to this point: during the 1995 referendum campaign, the Cree in northwestern Quebec held their own referendum on staying with Canada if Quebec unilaterally separated, and voted 96% to stay, taking territory with them equal to about (IIRC) 8% of Quebec’s defined size (though it was all in the north, along Hudson Bay, and mostly wilderness, though possibly valuable for mineral rights). They explicitly stated “If Canada is divisible, so is Quebec”. This predictably infuriated separatists who could do little more than sputter “no it’s not!”

The reason why the article (which I’ll admit I haven’t read) mentions anglophone dissatisfaction and not francophone dissatisfaction is that opposition to official bilingualism in Canada is largely a political position of the Western populist conservatives. They rose to prominence in the 80s on a platform of giving Western Canada the political power that they believe it deserves, but that Central Canada (i.e. Ontario and Quebec) is keeping away from them. Their opposition to official bilingualism is due to the fact that Western Canadians typically speak English but next to no French (due to French almost not being spoken at all over there, for historical reasons), so that prevents them from getting positions in the federal public service that are officially designated as bilingual. (In theory. I hear there are ways around that.) The populist conservatives believe there should be no official bilingualism policy, so that anglophones can get any job they want in the federal public service without having to learn what they consider to be a useless language.

The Western populist conservatives do not care whether official bilingualism policies make it hard or not for francophones to get officially bilingual positions, literally because that’s totally outside of their political radar. That, for example, there are also officially bilingual positions in Saguenay, despite there being precious few English speakers over there, is just none of their concern. It doesn’t affect them because Western voters aren’t applying for positions in Saguenay.

There are also anglophones who oppose official bilingualism in places where both language communities coexist, such as Ottawa for example. In that case, their frustration is due to the fact that there visibly are more francophones than anglophones who get jobs requiring bilingualism, due to there being more bilingual (French-English) francophones than bilingual (English-French) anglophones. So they view bilingualism as the thing that keeps them out of a job, and since most francophones they know do speak English as I’ve said, they question the need for employees to know French. We can, like, all speak English right, even the French guys? But of course, even in places like Ottawa there are (few, but some) French speakers whose English is insufficient to communicate fluently, especially if they are, for example, in the emergency room having a stroke. So it makes sense to have bilingual workers, and for the unilingual anglophones who are affected by that, the solution is kind of obvious. But it’s easier to complain about being discriminated against than actually do something about it.

Yeah, there are. (I believe I am one, would you agree?) But you can’t make everybody in the world, or even in Canada, fluent in English or in any other language. When a country declares a language to be (one of) its official language(s), what it usually means is that you should be able to communicate with its government in that language. Canadian official bilingualism policies are simply a direct consequence of the fact that Canada declares both English and French to be its (federal) official languages. To reverse them, you’d need to fundamentally reverse Canada having declared them both official. I’m not saying I’m against the idea, but that’s the only honest way to say it.

Well, to be honest, Longueuil is quite close to Montreal, and many jobs in that region do require fluency in both official languages. That’s actually become a problem in the last few years, with many immigrants to Quebec (from the Maghreb for example) being fluent in French, but knowing very little English. So they arrive here, and find out that many jobs require them to be able to speak English. Just so code_grey can realise that language requirements don’t only shut out anglophones.

I haven’t read the book, but as I understand it, its main thesis was that French speakers in Canada were basically used as an uneducated underclass, doing menial, underpaid labour for capitalist masters, in a way that’s reminiscent of blacks in America. While I may not agree with Vallières’s Marxist leanings, or his solution to the problem, that’s actually a fairly unobjectionable description of Canadian francophones before the 60s and the Quiet Revolution. I’m not blaming anyone or trying to find fault, or claiming that there was a concerted effort by English speakers to keep exploiting French speakers and to keep them in their place, and I don’t think Vallières would say that either. It’s just a description of a situation that existed. And if there is a single reason why I’m proud to be a Quebecer, it’s that we managed to get so far in the last half-century.

And I will note that there are quite a few links we can make between francophone Quebecers and African-Americans in terms of how they view themselves as peoples. Both are insecure peoples, uncertain of their abilities, and a bit disdainful of themselves and their realisations. In the past, and sometimes today, both had a tendency to try to emulate the other, more successful group in their country (whites in the US, anglophones in Canada). And more visibly, both speak languages that, even to this day, they tend to view with a certain amount of disdain, as an inferior, low-class version of how it should really be spoken, and this disdain is actually sometimes shared by the other group in their country. You yourself md2000 pretty much described Quebec French as a low-class ersatz of French.

We’re not talking about independence here; the OP’s question was actually about official bilingualism. But this said, there is no way to know what would happen if Quebec separated from Canada. There just isn’t any precedent, and it really depends on the characters of the people in charge at the time, and on what both new countries would want to have in terms of relations. It could be a bit like Ireland separating from the UK, or it could be something much different. So you talk about “separatist propaganda”… both sides wanted to show the good things that would happen if we voted their way, and the bad things that would happen if we didn’t. Don’t delude yourself thinking that federalists and English Canadians are all good, right-thinking honest people, while sovereigntists are all idiots or liars. There are good arguments on every side (but of course that’s not something you’ll see in the English-language press).

Already been addressed, somewhat. But, really? You’d say/think that? Ever heard a francophone w/o near-native English competence try to speak English? I have, and it’s gruesome. Let’s start and begin with accord of the tenses. 'Nuff said. I speak better French – guaranteed – than the vast majority of supposedly “anglophone” QUEBECOIS speak English. And I just learned the language by talking with grandparents as a child and working in la francophonie; no classes or anything besides a few years in middle school/high school.