Juno News - August 31, 2019


Official bilingualism has gone too far

Hosted by
Andrew Lutton
This week's most biased news! Trudeau is trying to buy your vote with your money

Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

171.75

Word count

567

Sentence count

26

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Air Canada was fined $21,000 by a judge after a French-speaking couple filed over 20 complaints against the company, saying that the company was not sufficiently bilingual and violated their linguistic rights as francophones. Andrew Lutton explains why.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 You may have seen this story flying around the internet in the last few days.
00:00:06.040 Air Canada was fined $21,000 by a judge after a French-speaking Ontario couple filed over
00:00:14.580 20 complaints against Air Canada saying that the company was not sufficiently bilingual
00:00:20.780 and violated the couple's linguistic rights as francophones.
00:00:25.500 Anyone who's traveled on Air Canada, as I do not irregularly, would know that Air Canada
00:00:30.800 goes out of its way to do everything in English and in French.
00:00:35.480 You have to hear the safety demonstration in both official languages.
00:00:39.120 On every flight, you have the opportunity to speak to a French or English flight attendant.
00:00:43.740 And yes, all of the materials in the seats, all the movies are available in English or
00:00:48.580 in French.
00:00:49.580 But this couple was not denied any linguistic rights.
00:00:53.840 When you look at the actual complaints they had, one of them was that the French word
00:00:59.180 for exit, sortie, was written in smaller font than the English exit in some cases.
00:01:06.080 Or those metal seat belts that tell you how to open them with the engraved word lift did
00:01:10.980 not have an engraved French word.
00:01:13.600 Nowhere did the couple actually argue it didn't know how to lift the seat belts. 1.00
00:01:17.440 Nowhere did the couple argue it didn't know where the exits were.
00:01:20.460 Nowhere did the couple argue that it wasn't told any of the essential information needed
00:01:25.220 for flying in French.
00:01:26.800 They were nitpicking.
00:01:28.740 They were actually scanning the entire plane, finding anything they could think of that would
00:01:34.160 present an alleged inequality between the English and the French.
00:01:38.800 Now by the letter of the law, what the judge found is that Air Canada did not uphold its
00:01:43.300 obligation to offer both services in English or in French.
00:01:47.140 But any sane thinking person would realize this is an absolutely abominable interpretation
00:01:53.180 of what bilingualism is supposed to be about.
00:01:56.140 Now I don't resent the French.
00:01:58.140 In fact, one of the things that I think makes Canada so unique is that we have such a linguistic
00:02:02.940 diversity in the country.
00:02:04.920 But this should not mean that we have the right to demand private companies, which is what
00:02:08.940 Air Canada is despite its past as a crown corporation, bend over backwards and go so
00:02:14.800 far as to etch French wording into seat belts just because someone wants to pick a fight,
00:02:21.520 which is exactly what this couple did. 0.98
00:02:23.880 But the problem is that official bilingualism in Canada has now gone so far that people use
00:02:28.920 it as a crutch rather than for its intended purpose, which is to make sure that a significant
00:02:34.440 chunk of the population in Canada was not left behind. 0.98
00:02:37.900 Take for example, a man in a French speaking area of Manitoba who had a speeding ticket thrown
00:02:43.380 out because the police officer who gave it to him spoke English and wrote English on the
00:02:48.380 ticket.
00:02:49.380 Literally got the ticket thrown out.
00:02:51.800 Or take a look at this headline here.
00:02:54.200 Does this sound like something that's actually about discrimination or does it sound like
00:02:58.840 someone is just trying to drive a wedge between English Canada and French Canada?
00:03:03.600 These stories like that of the Thibodeaux and their lawsuit against Air Canada only serve
00:03:08.300 to grow resentment of French Canadians from English Canada, which is hardly the best application
00:03:14.880 of these types of laws.
00:03:16.580 For True North, I'm Andrew Lutton.