Juno News - November 25, 2019


The weaponizing of “official bilingualism”

Hosted by
Andrew Lutton
Mentioned
Michelle Thibodeau Linda
Public sector union influence is on the rise The Candice Malcolm Show： Canadian confederation is broken

Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

162.18

Word count

595

Sentence count

35

Harmful content

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Bilingualism in Canada has gone too far. As I ve said time and time again, official bilingualism has gone far too far, and all Canadians have to pay the price when disgruntled people decide to take it upon themselves to become the bilingualism enforcers of Canada.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
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.
00:00:00.320 As I've said time and time again, official bilingualism in Canada has gone too far.
00:00:11.040 The latest example sounds pretty much exactly like the examples we've had in recent months.
00:00:17.220 Individuals who have decided to take it upon themselves to become the unofficial enforcers
00:00:22.100 of bilingualism in Canada and continue to receive payouts from organizations and from
00:00:28.400 the government itself because of this crusade.
00:00:31.520 Michel Thibodeau has now received $1,500 from the Senate of Canada after a federal court judge
00:00:38.140 ordered that his complaint against Parliament was valid.
00:00:42.000 That complaint?
00:00:43.620 That the drinking fountains in the Senate hallway had the word PUSH embossed into the push button
00:00:49.960 rather than the French equivalent PUSSAY or English and French.
00:00:55.540 That's it.
00:00:56.300 Yeah, no, I'm being serious here.
00:00:58.940 That's the complaint.
00:00:59.700 $1,500 because a drinking fountains push button said PUSH instead of having an English and
00:01:05.100 French language.
00:01:06.040 Now, Parliament Hill right now is going through massive renovations.
00:01:09.840 The judge in the case said perhaps this is an opportunity to replace it with bilingual
00:01:14.880 embossing.
00:01:16.340 Although in the meantime, signage has been put up telling people in English and in French
00:01:20.860 if they want to drink water, they can PUSH.
00:01:22.840 I bet you didn't know that French people have just been dying of dehydration and dying of 0.93
00:01:27.600 thirst for years in Canada because they didn't know that they had to push the button because
00:01:31.720 it didn't have the word PUSH in French.
00:01:34.040 It's actually been quite horrific.
00:01:35.680 You have to climb over the bodies of dehydrated Francophones to get anywhere in the Senate these
00:01:41.200 days.
00:01:41.860 It's absolutely insane.
00:01:43.080 But Monsieur Thibodeau was the same man who, along with his wife Linda, was able to get
00:01:48.280 $21,000 from Air Canada just a few months ago after a complaint about a number of things,
00:01:54.940 one of which was that the seatbelt had PULL written in English but not in French.
00:02:01.120 That was one of the major complaints that led to them getting a five-figure judgment against
00:02:06.620 Air Canada.
00:02:07.220 Now, you've heard of class action lawsuits where a whole bunch of people team up and
00:02:11.680 sue one company.
00:02:13.000 The Thibodeaux seem to be engaging in reverse class action, the two of them filing complaints
00:02:18.180 against as many people as they can find under this official languages bureaucracy in Canada.
00:02:24.500 For example, according to a CTV News article, in 2016, the two of them filed 22 separate complaints
00:02:32.220 under the Official Languages Act.
00:02:34.260 Now, the purpose of this act is to ensure that Anglophones and Francophones are both able
00:02:39.100 to access the same fundamental public services in Canada.
00:02:42.660 It was never meant to be a grievance mill for people who find a way to catch the government
00:02:48.920 because a drinking fountain button or a seatbelt lever doesn't have bilingual lettering on
00:02:55.360 it.
00:02:55.480 That was never the purpose of the act.
00:02:57.580 But it's been weaponized now.
00:02:59.140 And all Canadians have to pay the price when a few disgruntled people decide they're going
00:03:03.900 to take it upon themselves to become the bilingualism enforcers of Canada.
00:03:09.340 We have to push back against this.
00:03:11.100 We have a country that has an English identity and a French identity.
00:03:15.160 Yes.
00:03:15.580 But you're never going to have cohesion between these two groups when basically the federal
00:03:20.300 court is engaging in this gotcha-ism with the other.
00:03:24.180 You know, maybe you just can't find bilingual lettering from your drinking fountain manufacturers
00:03:29.500 or your seatbelt manufacturers.
00:03:31.380 Is there not a way to work through this by discussing rather than taking everyone to court?
00:03:37.080 Apparently not.
00:03:38.380 For True North, I'm Andrew Lutton.