I think you completely missed Sean's point, which is that those living in wholly English-speaking communities take it as a given that a major party leader has to be proficient in English, but regard French proficiency as an "issue". That's the real bubble - refusing to look outside your own community.
And my point is that the communities where the majority of Canadians live are multilingual and multi-racial and not wholly English speaking. I am looking at my community and my sons friends. They went to French immersion and after ten years of not speaking French at school they are not fluent speakers. Many do speak Mandarin or Cantonese or Tagalog because they have many opportunities to speak their second language and keep your skills up. But to you and Sean that is not really bilingual that is irrelevant to REAL Canadians. The idea that a person needs to also be able to be fluent in French just reduces the pool of potential candidates down to primarily white Canadian born residents of Central Canada.
Thanks for all the implications first that I am clueless being a resident of Ottawa, even if I do not work for the government or a government agency and never have, and now that I am racist. You are acting like an ass.
I have never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever ever, ever, ever, ever, ever suggested that "real" Canadians have to speak English or French or are white.
APOLOGIZE TO ME NOW
I did not refer to people who speak more than one language as not being bilingual.
APOLOGIZE TO ME NOW
I have never suggested any priority of those living in central Canada
APOLOGIZE TO ME NOW
There is no point that you are making that I did not acknowledge including languages that are not official -- except that your suggestion of equivalency between French and Chinese is definitely a result of some bubble, bigotry or myopia you are suffering from.
Let's unpack this a little and move beyond your stupid suggestion that it is racist not to see these languages as equal -- even forgetting the fact of two official languages spoken not only by those whose mother tongue is one of them but by the majority who speak what Statistics Canada term immigrant languages. We really do need to investigate the stupidity you have engaged in here after all.
Statistics:
As of 2015 more people reported speaking French at home than all other non official languages put together.
Let me repeat that:
As of 2015 more people reported speaking French at home than all other non official languages put together.
63% of those whose first language is neither English nor French speak one of those two official languages AT HOME.
72.8% of people in Quebec speak ONLY French AT HOME.
Some 7 million people report French as their first language while a total of 6.6 million report some other language (all of them combined)
In the rest of Canada 74% of Anglophones speak ONLY English AT HOME
17.5% of Canadians speak both official languages
Now since you want to suggest I am racist, let's compare French, English and Mandarin directly forgetting the issue of history, official languages etc.
Last census
English mother tongue: 18.8 million
French mother tongue: 7 million
Mandarin 248 thousand
Now to be fair many reported Chinese without specifying: 428 thousand
All Chinese together (remembering that many of these language groups do not understand each other) and you barely cross 1 million.
So even if Mandarin was an official language French by the numbers would be about 8 times more important (7 times if you include all Chinese languages together).
APOLOGIZE TO ME NOW
BTW kropotkin1951, I used to respect you.