Categories: Andrew Coyne, Capital Read

Double double standard

by Andrew Coyne on Friday, October 10, 2008 6:53pm - 0 Comments

In a radio interview in Montreal, Duceppe said Harper’s comments serve to illustrate the “double standard” that exists when it comes to Canada’s official languages.

Canadians demand that French political leaders speak English fluently, but English-speaking leaders can get away with mangling French, he said.

[Canadian Press]

Norman Spector has offered the obvious rejoinder: that Canadians elected Jean Chrétien, notwithstanding his barely-comprehensible English, to three straight majorities.

I’ll add another: it was English-speaking Canadians who did so. Francophone Quebecers largely turned their back on him, with Duceppe’s hearty encouragement, for sins that included… his French. How many times has one read how Chrétien’s crude, backwoods French, strewn with grammatical errors and anglicisms, was an embarrassment to sophisticated urban francophones, how it made them cringe?

English-speaking leaders can get away with mangling French? Can they? Could Preston Manning? Stockwell Day? Kim Campbell? Joe Clark? How’d that work for John Crosbie or Belinda Stronach’s leadership bids? In fact, no leader who was not fluently French-speaking has carried Quebec since Lester Pearson in 1965 — and since 1930, with one exception, no leader has won a majority in Parliament without carrrying Quebec. The exception? Jean Chrétien.

As Norman says, “nobody does humiliation better than Duceppe.” Or hypocrisy.

ENCORE: Deux Maudits Anglais has another take.

ENCORE DEUX FOIS: Just to complete the circle, I seem to recall seeing a quote from Duceppe somewhere at the conclusion of the English debate observing how Dion was “really struggling” in English, or words to that effect. Ten points to the reader who can supply the link.

ENCORE TROIS FOIS: Duceppe, whose own English is accented to the point of absurdity, is often declared the winner of the English debates, by English-speaking commentators.

ENCORE QUATRE FOIS: In point of fact, Harper never criticized Dion’s English, or suggested it explained his difficulties answering the question. Tory bloggers, alas, have not been so restrained, nor was Mike Duffy (or so I’m told: it doesn’t show up in the clip).

Tags: Election Watch, Gilles Duceppe, humiliation, hypocrisy, Jean Chretien, language wars, Stéphane Dion

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Al Heck Brakes

The hot question of course is not in which language the so-called leaders have the most facility, but why the government has so much control over people’s lives that anyone cares which vocabulary and accent they use for their idiotic babbling.

When government was small and taxes were light nobody cared if, say, the kings from the line of Saxe-Cobourg and Gotha spoke English, German or Bantu. Whole empires, kingdoms, principalities and dukedoms flourished for hundreds of years in which hardly anyone cared what the nibs were talking about, as long as they were left alone.

Now you’ve really hosed yourselves – you’ve thrown all your money and property into a common pile to be centrally managed and you’re scared to death that you won’t be able to get the gist of what the partisan oligarchs are saying when they make pronouncements on the disposition of your property. And many of you are deeply concerned that on the basis of mother tongue your children won’t qualify for the only jobs worth having any more, carrying water for the oligarchs.

Here you are faced with the situation in which the people who control your life are either throwing 25 billion of your money – or not throwing – at the banks, for reasons which make no sense since they’ve just been practically shouting at you that there is no problem whatsoever with any bank. Whenever there is so much shouting and lying going on then you can be pretty sure that a tremendous con job is being pulled off. But you’re so baffled by the language thing that instead of asking sharp, intense questions about exactly whose money is going where and why, it’s as if you’ve completely written off your entire financial fortunes as belonging to “them”, and you’re going to focus from now on and forever on arguing over accents. Way to go.