[QUOTE=Lunar Saltlick]
Sorry, I’m lost again. I don’t remember the last time I saw 101 scrawled on anything. Which decade are we talking about? I haven’t lived in Canada or Montreal all my life, but from what I’ve seen, anglos have it swell here. Listening to them whine nauseates me.
At the place where I work, we currently have about a hundred long-term consultants from all over Canada and the US. None of them can speak a word of French. You should see all the francophones in our office bending over backwards to speak English to them. You should hear the consultants on the phone to their landords, setting up their various long-term rentals in English. You should hear them on the phone talking to various government departments about taxes, getting their family members visas, etc., etc., etc., all in English. For a place that supposedly has draconian language laws, Montreal is very anglo-friendly. The instances of pedantic insanity are few and far between.
As I wrote in my first post in this thread, English used to rule Quebec, and now, to a certain extent, the pendulum has swung. It’s never going to be perfect, and if some museum guides don’t get translated, well, my god, the horror!
I’m a pretty harsh critic of Canada and Quebec, but you have to pick your spots.
[/QUOTE]
Re: 101. This was a few weekends ago in three separate spots (The window of Escada, which was also broken, and two separate property developments downtown and on the Plateau, both of which had signs in French and English, only the writing was the same size).
And hey, I find it just as annoying that people, especially university students (I’m pretty sure there are laws for anyone younger about where they are/aren’t allowed to go to school), fly in, get an education and leave without ever having to leave the student ghetto or learn French. But I know just as many who’ve tried hard with the French education they’ve been given and still gotten more than a few 'maudit Anglo’s and, funnily enough, landlords who refused to give them an English contract. Wanting to read a legal document in your native language? Horrors. Don’t get me started on Mohawk students heading in from Kahnawake, many of whom learn English before French so they can communicate with other First Nations residents. One of the very few times I was dumb enough to get into a separation debate with French-Canadian friends I brought up the fact that First Nations in Quebec (though really we seem to be discussing Montreal, whose Anglo-friendliness is unheard of in most of the province) would secede from the province. They thought this ridiculous, and one friend even said that ‘Their culture is dead. They need to stop living in the past.’ Right.
I understand the reasoning between many of the province’s (though, again, this is mostly Montreal, which really is an Anglo ghetto anywhere West of St Laurent) rules and attitudes, but it wouldn’t be the first time in history the pendulum is swung too far the other way.
