Daycare Update

In six months of reading CV's and conducting interviews one thing is clear: The "ethnic" candidates are blingual and usually even trilingual. The "Quebecois" candidates or French-Canadians, are strictly unilingual.

So, I had to ask my director - bilingual herself - how in this day and age we're still seeing French kids coming out of college who can't speak a lick of English. It's amazing. My parents want nothing to do with unilingualism yet that's what the system spits out. This state of affairs pleases the likes of Imperatif Montreal and L'Office de la Langue Francaise, but for the rest of us, those with a mind outside the tribe, it's unfortunate and not useful.

Her response was pretty much what we on the other side of the language divide thought: French-Canadians remain parochial on their views of culture and language.

When will Quebec mature on matters of language and accept the English fact in this province with grace?

***

I'll never forget while watching television with some members of my wife's family years back. One of them was a nationalist Quebecer who still spoke as if Italians were recently immigrated folk. We were watching a report about art and museums on a French new channel. It was from New York and the reporter said something like, "les Americains sont hombristes..."

I didn't know what 'hombristes' meant so I asked the nationalist who in turn explained it meant 'parochial.'

"Geez, if Americans are "parochial" what does that make Quebecers and Canadians!" I replied.