Would you like to see your state/province divided?

[Nava]

@Hari_Seldon

For the past month, the province has been in an uproar because the Canadiens chose an acting hockey coach who doesn’t speak French and this is considered an enormous affront to the citizenry. Don’t they have more important things to worry about? Guess not.

Thanks for the fit of giggles I just got imagining what would happen if every Liga player or coach had to be able to speak Spanish before being hired, with Athletic de Bilbao (a team which makes a point of only having Basque players, but which has been known to have variable definitions of the term) requiring their players to have an Official Certificate in Euskera, Barça requiring the same for Catalan, and Valencia FC requiring anybody who speaks Catalan to learn Valenciano instead. Celta de Vigo might or might not require Galego, as generally Galegos can’t be arsed make a fuss about language. Oh, for a political and economical situation where that was the biggest worry!

[Scarlett67]

@Acsenray

Wisconsin is being split up?

I was referring to political divisiveness. Google “Governor Scott Walker” if you haven’t already heard of him.

[Hypnagogic_Jerk]

@Hari_Seldon

Posting from Montreal. I would love to see the province split it two, with the western half of Montreal, parts of the province along the VT border and the region around Ottawa (now called Gatineau) put into one half that would be officially bilingual and the rest of it put into the other half and if they want to be unilingual French, let them.

Coming from Gatineau (though living in Sherbrooke now), I definitely don’t want the city the split from Quebec. Other Quebecers sometimes have trouble understanding that we’re not actually Ontarians, but trust me, we aren’t.

I don’t especially want Quebec to be split, but if the Pontiac region (that’s the part west of Gatineau) ever wants to do it, I wouldn’t shed too many tears. They’d presumably join Ontario, if Ontario wants them of course. But it’d probably create a bad precedent.

For the past month, the province has been in an uproar because the Canadiens chose an acting hockey coach who doesn’t speak French and this is considered an enormous affront to the citizenry. Don’t they have more important things to worry about?

Like all anglophones, you’re misunderstanding the issue, but this is not the thread for it and you people will never understand or care anyway. But an interesting comment I heard about it was that the Canadiens managed to do what the Caisse de dépôt and Hydro-Québec couldn’t: make people care about whether executives in our economy’s leaders can actually communicate in French. That’s a testament to the importance of symbols, and to how important a symbol the Canadiens are.

[Hypnagogic_Jerk]

@Nava

Thanks for the fit of giggles I just got imagining what would happen if every Liga player or coach had to be able to speak Spanish before being hired

So are you saying that Liga players and coaches are actually expected to learn Spanish after being hired? Because that’s the important issue. The Canadiens have a small minority of players who can actually communicate in French. That’s a major difference from the past: a generation ago many of the team’s best players were from Quebec, and even those who weren’t usually learned some French in order to speak with the fans. Today the team is perceived as not caring about this in the slightest, and having only the most tenuous connection to Montreal after all. Hiring a coach who cannot even answer the journalists’ questions in French during the daily (and I don’t think I’m exaggerating here; that’s the importance the team has) press conferences was seen as the last straw.