The Legault government

A referendum 3 years from now. If the CAQ are going to get brownie points., why a referendum? And why in 3 years ?

I'll eat my hat if CAQ ushers in PR.

bekayne wrote:

alan smithee wrote:

bekayne wrote:

alan smithee wrote:

It will be decided by referendum in 2022...I wouldn't hold my breath

We all know how successful referendums on electoral reform are.

Educate me Zen master

I was being sarcastic.

I'm sorry...I have a hard time recognizing sarcasm on the computer because I cannot hear one's tone. Colour me embarassed

Pondering wrote:

I refuse to be  on this. It will recieve a lot of support from the other parties and Quebec marches to its own drummer. 

 

I can see it failing very easily. Both francophones in the regions and anglophones in the west island are being told that this is a trick to take away their voice. Francophones in Montreal from what I've heard are heavily in favor, but just because the people who have the largest voice in the media support it doesn't mean it'll happen.

I'm probably voting yes unless the system they're proposing is ridiculous.

pietro_bcc wrote:

https://montrealgazette.com/news/quebec/quebec-wants-to-ban-bonjour-hi-i...

Hilarious, these people are the equivalent of Republicans who cry when people say "Happy Holidays" instead of Merry Christmas. Now the CAQ is saying they'll pass their own "SAY MERRY CHRISTMAS, NOT HAPPY HOLIDAYS!" laws. MQFA!

What a bunch of absolute clownish babies, policing greetings... what a world.

I think this proposed idea is kinda goofy, but just to play Devil's Advocate, is it really all that different from saying that a privately run business has to sell products according to metric measurements, rather than imperial? I mean, in a lot of cases, eg. the selling and purchase of milk, there aren't any real questions of life-and-death, or even basic health and safety, involved.

It is silly to police it, but "Bonjour - Hi" is rather ridiculously tacky. They aren't even in the same register of language. And yes, I do think it undermines French as a common language of communication - and I speak several languages.

Unionist wrote:

If Anglo-Canadians haven't come to terms with Bill 101 after more than four decades, I guess they never will. Québec polices the language of workplaces, of commercial signs, of traffic signs. If that bothers you, say so and make your case. Don't go after the easy stuff (policing of greetings).

And keep this in mind: Bill 101, with all its flaws, is the main reason Québec is still part of Canada, after decades of dissent and two referenda. Non-fanatical Anglo-Quebecers understand that clearly, and that's why: 1) they don't fight it any more; and 2) their rate of bilingualism has skyrocketed over those decades.

What does bonjour/hi have to do with Bill (or if you prefer Law 101). Nowhere in the law is any greeting mentioned? I do have issues with certain parts of the law. Specifically the section that prevents non anglophones from sending their children to english public school, which has resulted in 28 English schools being shuttered in the last 20 years (btw this section of the law is opposed by a majority of anglophones, allophones and in fact francophones according to a Leger poll, yet not a single politician. 0% of the national assembly represents the majority on this question.)

Also the law has nothing to do with Quebec still being in Canada, I hear this argument all the time that after the implementation of 101 it made francophones feel less urgency to leave Canada because french was protected, but the numbers don't bear that out.

101 is enacted in 1977.

1980 First referendum fails 40-60

1995 Second referendum fails 49-51

If 101 was responsible for a decrease in support for sovereignty, then why did support for sovereignty increase? Now I'm not saying that 101 caused an increase of support for sovereignty, I'm saying that it was irrelevant to that question. It was other issues that caused support to increase and decrease.

https://montrealgazette.com/news/quebec/emsb-files-legal-challenge-again...

Glad the EMSB is contesting Bill 21. Bravo

Pondering wrote:

If Francophones themselves want to learn English there shouldn't be any law against it. 

Has anyone proposed a law against the teaching of English in Quebec?? 

pietro_bcc wrote:

http://www.ledevoir.com/documents/pdf/loi_101_juillet_2017.pdf

This was the poll I was refering to on page 7. The majority of anglophones, allophones and francophones are against the provisions of Bill 101 that ban francophones and allophones from sending their kids to english primary and secondary schools.

I don't claim a lot of knowledge about Quebec politics but despite this poll I doubt if any major party is going to run on a platform that includes repealing the Charter of the French Language. From afar it looks like opening up the Charter for debate about what stays and what goes in any major amendments will be as productive as the debate around Bill 21.

https://montrealgazette.com/news/quebec/bill-40-discriminates-against-fr...

The FCSQ is against Bill 40 because it discriminates against Francophones and creates 2 classes of Quebecois with different rights for Anglophone and Francophone (specifically anglos will be allowed to elect service center bureaucrats while francophones won't.)... This is a comedy routine right? Or has this guy been in a coma for the past 40 years? Whether you agree with the law or not, it is indisputable that Anglos have the right to send their children to an English school, a right not held by Francophones. That's not a value judgement, its a statement of fact.

If he thinks Bill 40 will create 2 classes of citizen each with different rights, he's 40 years too late... wow.

The term "historic anglophone minority" is disturbing because it creates two classes of anglophones. I have the right to send my future kids to an english school because I went to an english school. But I am clearly not a part of this "historic" anglophone minority. My parents came here in the 60's. So according to this policy I would be able to send my kids to an english school, but would not be able to receive other services in english because I am not a part of the "historic english minority", only the contemporary english minority.

A government that is completely centered around division. I hope that this infantilization of the Quebec population at the hands of the CAQ will result in a backlash in the opposite direction. Completely sickening, but the logical conclusion of the government's language policy over the past 40 years, its just been sped up with the CAQ.

It is important to recognize that in many cases the services that will be withheld in English are ones that relate to essentials including health and safety.

It is also about making an admission that services are available and translations exist but they will not be shared based on the status of the recipient.

It is not a statement that a government employee would not be required to provide services in English. They are not allowed to do so.

think: if there is a form that is not translated (understandable if numbers did not warrant a translation) and then an employee who wants to help a person by explaining it in English - they would not be allowed to. and now the ministry would not be allowed to give the English language copy -- even if they had it under the desk.

This is not about people who are just Allophones. This includes shutting out people who are Anglophones who did not have a parent go to school in Quebec -- Legault clarified today.

Just imagine if a person who spoke Russian as a first language and was working for government saw an old person come in who was Russian and then tried to help them in Russian. We would say the person was lucky. If we were speaking of English they could lose their job after this policy in Quebec.

I do not think this comes from any groundswell of desire by the population nor does it come from any study showing this protects French.

Protection of French when it comes to immigrants does not need to come from oppression -- it comes from changing the language requirements so that the province stops accepting people without enough French as Quebec immigrants.

I am speaking these days to people who came to Quebec in their immigration program from the Middle East not long ago and were told then that Quebec wanted them despite poor proficiency in French. Quebec wanted to increase the population and tax base for economic reasons. Now it wants to change the rules for those people -- A previous government told thousands of people that their French was good enough to come to Quebec and that they would have access to services. Now -- becuase they are immigrants --  it is withdrawing that.

Another point is that Legault is lying when he says this will not affect the English language historical community. Based on the principle (which is reasonable) of service where numbers warrant, many will lose access to what they technically may still have a right to get but is no longer justifiable based on the numbers. The calculation of where numbers warrant will change radically by this. The government is now producing its own method of establishing background rather than a declaration and identification from the population getting services. People who identify as Anglophone will not be allowed to do so unless they prove a pedigree -- the fact that they speak English and not French would not be sufficient.

The reaction in the rest of Canada will be predictably negative. Demographically for Quebec, it will be negative. Hard to see how Quebec wins. The perhaps politically the CAQ could benefit by creating division and profiting from it.

Again this is not a policy proven to be wanted by the people of Quebec. People expect to see the French language protected and promoted. They expect to see English limited in many areas relating to employment and business. But this is nationalism and populism at its ugliest -- trying to whip up a reaction that is not based on public need, benefit or desire.

The direct targeting of immigrants is something that a previous generation of Quebec nationalists, I think, would have fought hard against.

This is very much a populist immigrant fighting intolerance ripped from the Trump playbook and translated into French.

Quebec's values test is not just xenophobic — it's misogynistic, too

True or false: in Quebec, women and men have the same rights and this is inscribed in law?

The question is at best aspirational, and at worst a trick. It’s also a question the Quebec government plans to pose to potential immigrants before they can complete the process to immigrate here.

Last week, Quebecers finally got a glimpse at some of the questions from the Coalition Avenir Québec’s long-anticipated policy. The example questions they circulated demonstrate that the policy is less about identifying what our common values are, and more about what the CAQ thinks our values ought to be.

The first question is curious. Women don’t have the same rights as men in Quebec or anywhere in Canada. This can be seen in many measures, from rates of violence against women to the gender wage gap. The first part of the question is false, unless they want potential immigrants to answer with what should be true. The second part — as inscribed in law — is more true, but if the effect of gender discrimination makes men and women less equal, what is the point of this question?

On Le Canal Nouvelles, Haroun Bouazzi, spokesman with the organization Muslims and Arabs for a Secular Quebec, argued that the existence of the values test implies to Quebecers the threat to women’s rights or LGBTTQ+ rights comes from outside the province. The problem, of course, is these rights are under attack by Quebecers.

In the interview, Bouazzi says that maybe a values test, and commensurate education, is actually needed for everyone.

Especially, it would seem, at the National Assembly, where a member’s Halloween costume has created a crisis among the parties that strongly believe women must dress a certain way when they’re elected.....

By the way, anyone who is a Canadian citizen and who went to school in English anywhere in Canada is entitled to send their children to an anglophone school. However, Jamaicans, USAmericans and Brits may not.

Personally, I think they are better off sending the children to a French school in most cases, although there are some English schools that actually have a 50-50 programme. And yes, it is a problem that the ESL teaching here is generally the pits.

lagatta4 wrote:

By the way, anyone who is a Canadian citizen and who went to school in English anywhere in Canada is entitled to send their children to an anglophone school. However, Jamaicans, USAmericans and Brits may not.

Personally, I think they are better off sending the children to a French school in most cases, although there are some English schools that actually have a 50-50 programme. And yes, it is a problem that the ESL teaching here is generally the pits.

By the way I agree generally with your comments about second language schools and education.

I would like to add that while ESL is the pits in Quebec, FSL is the pits in the rest of Canada.

There are some critical considerations if we actually care about the kids at all and these come from the science of education:

People learn their first language through memory and correction. Particularly in English it is a significant struggle for people to learn how their language straucture works. second language instruction very much depends on the structure of language. this is one of only a few reasons that proficiency in the first langauge improves with second language instruction.

There have been controversial studies about the proficiency of English among kids in French immersion. It averages higher. Much higher. For a while they just presumed that the issue was with selection -- stronger people in English were choosing French immersion and it was not hurting them. However, there have been studies that controlled for this and they found that children who learned a second language improved in their first (over a longer term) even though they had recieved less first language instruction.

Another issue that has come up in many parts of Canada is how this affects children coming to Canada from non English or French speaking backgrounds. Boards of education at first thought that confusing them with a third language was a problem but then made a fundamental discovery: A child who is ESL is better off going into an immersion program than going to an English program. In the immersion the learnign of French suypports English and it also is done from a second language perspective and this assists with kids who are ESL in programs designed for teaching English as a first langauge. There is the added advantage that these kids are able to compete and have success more easily in French immersion where they are not so far behind their peers as they are in English classes with kids who learned English at home.

Then there is the issue of making sounds. Children are best learning a second language early as their mouths literally adapt and can make the sounds more easily when they are growing. Having a third language actually increases flexibility.

All this is apart from the studies that show that new languages provide numerous mental and psychological benefits with additional flexibility in concepts.

All this to say that language instruction is not always as simple as you think.

If we did what was best for the kids most children would be in an immersion school early in their education in all of Canada.

This has got to be the height of bureaucratic insanity.

A French doctoral student has been denied residency in Quebec after officials in Canada’s francophone province ruled that she had an inadequate command of her mother tongue.

Emilie Dubois, a graphic designer who has lived and studied in Quebec City for eight years, was stunned to find her recent residency application denied on the grounds that she failed to demonstrate sufficient knowledge of French.

“I have a diploma from a francophone university, the first in Canada. I’m a French citizen, too, and I did all of my studies in French,” she told Radio-Canada.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/nov/08/quebec-denies-frenchwoman-...

Actually, looking at the details, it doesn't seem that absurd to me...

“The first letter said you are not proving you know how to speak French because your thesis is considered to be written in English,” Dubois told the National Post.

The letter read: “You did not complete program of study in Quebec entirely in French, including the dissertation or thesis.”

Presumably, part of proving command of French is completing the "program of study in French", but one chapter of her dissertation is in English. Which the minstry presumably thinks renders the French-study requirement incomplete.

Now, some people might think that's overly legalistic, but then, what happens if someone else comes along with a disseration that has two chapters in English? Three? Four?

All that said, if it is a hard and fast requrement, maybe someone could have notified her of this before she completed the disseration? Not sure if she could have written two intros, one in English, for publication, and a translation in French for the ministry.

an inflexible and very stupid guideline

That's the theory I was entertaining, my point being that if "Disseratation 100% in French" was part of the requirement, I wouldn't blame the civil-servant for refusing her application. You can't just ignore rules because they seem ridiculous to you.

But if the decision is discretionary on the part of the civil servant making the decision, based on weighing all the pros and cons in the case, then yeah, I'd agree, it was pretty ridiculous.  

voice of the damned wrote:

an inflexible and very stupid guideline

That's the theory I was entertaining, my point being that if "Disseratation 100% in French" was part of the requirement, I wouldn't blame the civil-servant for refusing her application. You can't just ignore rules because they seem ridiculous to you.

But if the decision is discretionary on the part of the civil servant making the decision, based on weighing all the pros and cons in the case, then yeah, I'd agree, it was pretty ridiculous.  

 

I hope someone uses access to information to find out. 

Québec solidaire's response to Simon Jolin-Barrette's regulation withdrawal: https://quebecsolidaire.net/nouvelle/retrait-du-reglement-de-simon-jolin...

Sorry, I don't have time to translate this today; I'm translating something else, for $$$. I did like the barb: "humility or humiliation"...

pietro_bcc wrote:

The CAQ managed to propose an MMP system that is so bad that baring significant amendments I'll be voting for FPTP. Yeah I'm going to vote for Montreal to lose 3 seats (Quebec City and Montérégie would also lose seats) in favor of giving sparcely populated regions more seats that they don't deserved based on their population weight, instead of stealing seats from Montreal they should merge Îles-de-la-Madeleine and Gaspé so that they have a reasonable population for their riding.

Even proposals to create greater democracy by a more proportional system will be hijacked by those seeking to gerrymander.

The CAQ is of course weakest on the Island of Montreal where I believe it only got a couple seats. Therefore the transfer of three Montreal seats to the regions would be to its advantage.

this negative feature however needs to be balanced against the salutary effects of PR. Quebec Solidaire which won most of its seats in Montreal seems to support the new proposal. Under a strict PR regime it would roughly double its seats from 10 to 20.

MMP complicates this of course. Is anyone aware of any extrapolation of the last election results through the new system?

I've double posted this because of its relevance to Quebec. 

Quebec has been the hardest hit province both in terms of total COVID-19 cases and its problems in longterm care homes. The factors leading to the long term care home resident crisis were laregly predictable. 

It is interesting that Quebec has three times as many private long term care residents (18.4% ) as the Canadian average of 6.1%. The Maison Herron private long-term care facility in Dorval, whose owners are under criminal investigation over the death of 31 residents, had a bitter strike by workers for higher pay last year. In CBC National interview, the family of one of the deceased seniors said the failure to increase the home's low pay left many health care attendants in the home feeling little sense of loyalty to the employer, thereby contributing to their willingness to stop working as the risks to their own health grew. 

It should have been clear long before COVID-19 that the issues in the province’s long-term care homes would leave them poorly equipped to handle a pandemic.

“We already knew there was a lack of personnel, the salary wasn’t attractive, a heavy workload, a lack of manpower,” Philippe Voyer, a professor and researcher whose specialities including nursing and aging, said.

Louis Demers, who studies the health-care system and seniors residences at Quebec’s Ecole nationale d’administration publique, said he believes collective living arrangements for seniors were a governmental “blind spot” when it came to preparation, even though he believes officials reacted well overall. ...

Demers says it’s impossible to make blanket judgments about the long-term care system, since problems crop up on a case-by-case basis.

He says there are times when management may be fingered, such as the high-profile case of a private residence in Dorval, Que., where health authorities found residents lacking food and basic personal care, and eventually called police after learning that 31 people had died within weeks.

However, he noted there have also been major outbreaks at well-regarded public institutions, such as the Montreal Geriatric Institute.

While both Voyer and Demers are reluctant to assign blame, they say there are certainly lessons that need to be learned, especially given an aging population that is likely to need increasing levels of care.

Quebec Premier Francois Legault has promised to address worker shortages in care homes, through both temporary pay hikes and long-term recruitment, which both experts say is essential.

Voyer says badly configured residences, with long corridors and residents sharing rooms, have a harder time isolating sick residents from uninfected ones, compared to residences with house-style layouts, where residents live in smaller wings.

And both he and Demers say there’s an urgent need for more investment in home care, which can help avoid institutional settings altogether.

Statistics show that private seniors residences are a popular option for Quebecers when compared with the rest of Canada.

Some 18.4 per cent of Quebecers occupied such spaces in 2019, compared with just 6.1 per cent on average in other Canadian provinces, according to the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation. It says the discrepancy is explained by a much larger pool of residence spaces in Quebec and the lowest average rents for such spaces in the country.

https://nationalpost.com/pmn/news-pmn/canada-news-pmn/many-factors-behin...

This thread started with a post about the Legault government's religious symbols law. Can someone tell me if those laws were enacted and whether or not they are in effect during this pandemic.

I am astounded at the percentage of seniors in care in Quebec. My wife worked in long term care for 25 years before going to work for the HEU and we thought that the standards under the BC Liberals had become almost none existent but what is coming out of the care homes in Quebec appears to border on criminal negligence on a institutional scale. I hope that when the pandemic passes some of the executives of the companies responsible for this forcible catastrophe are charged and sent to jail.