Michel Rochette, president of the Quebec branch of the Retail Council of Canada, sees the Biden administration’s message as a "signal’’ couched in diplomatic language.
Michel Rochette, president of the Quebec branch of the Retail Council of Canada, sees the Biden administration’s message as a "signal’’ couched in diplomatic language.
I appreciate your anecdotal evidence, but it remains anecdotal. I could go on about my own anecdotes living in a province which, on paper is officially bilingual, but where I struggle to receive services in French. Even workplaces in Francophone-majority areas barely accommodate unilingual French speakers. I suspect your experience is far from the norm.
Look, I won’t pretend racism and xenophobia aren’t issues in Québecois society, they are and that deserves to be addressed. Anyone who says otherwise is a fool. What I take issue with is equating any and all measures to protect the French language with racism and xenophobia. Are the methods the current CAQ government using to supposedly “protect French” often steeped in racism and xenophobia? I definitely think they are. But the concept of French preservation is much larger than the CAQ’s definition of it. Québecois.es have not too distant memories of being second-class citizens under a rich Anglophone elite, I think anyone should understand why they would be apprehensive at multinational business interests entering the province and not giving any fucks about French.