The Ottawa Citizen
Thursday, January 13, 2005

Clarence-Rockland hires language police
New businesses forced to have signs with English, French in 'exactly the same size'
Dave Rogers


Clarence-Rockland has passed a bylaw requiring new businesses to post signs that give equal prominence to French and English, likely making it the first Ontario municipality to regulate the language on signs.

Mayor Richard Lalonde says businesses that fail to comply with the new sign bylaw will face fines up to $5,000 and could lose the performance bonds they post when city council approves their development plans.

Clarence-Rockland will have its own version of the Office quebecois de la langue francaise -- bylaw enforcement officers who will check new business signs to make sure the wording meets the city's language requirements.

Mr. Lalonde said yesterday Clarence-Rockland, a city of 22,000 about 35 kilometres east of Ottawa, is the first municipality in Ontario to require bilingual business signs and equal prominence for both languages.

The new bylaw applies to all outside signs. Existing businesses will be able to keep their current signs, but will have to meet the bilingualism requirements if they change them. Trade names won't have to be changed.

The eight-member city council approved the bylaw by a vote of seven-to-one on Monday after residents complained about Canadian Tire and Giant Tiger store signs that were in English only.

However, only a handful of people attended the meeting.

"I spoke to the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and they told me that it is within our powers to do this," Mr. Lalonde said. "Clarence-Rockland has been a bilingual municipality for at least seven or eight years and people have the right to be served in both official languages.

"The city is 68-per-cent francophone and 32-per-cent anglophone. When the Giant Tiger was put up about three years ago, hundreds of people complained about its signs and some wanted to block the entrance. We want to promote both languages and avoid complaints."

Mr. Lalonde said the Giant Tiger and Canadian Tire have since changed their signs to include French and English.

"Now the lettering will have to be exactly the same size in French and English," Mr. Lalonde said. "A bylaw officer will measure the lettering on the signs to make sure they meet the requirements.

"If the signs aren't to the satisfaction of the city, new businesses won't get their performance bonds back. People will be asked to change the signs and if they don't do so, we will use the performance bonds. The bonds are typically about 50 per cent of the value of the building."

Businesses post performance bonds with a municipality prior to development. If the business meets all the requirements set out in the site plan agreement, it gets the money back. If it doesn't, the municipality uses the bond to pay for the needed work.

Mr. Lalonde said he doesn't expect the new bylaw will be a problem for businesses because they are interested in earning a profit, not arguing about French and English.

Yves Bisson, president of the Clarence-Rockland Business Alliance, said new bilingual signs may be more expensive, but at least there will be more French signs on businesses.

"I would hope the bylaw would not discourage people from opening businesses in Clarence-Rockland," Mr. Bisson said. "Canadian Tire made a decision to put up bilingual signs before this regulation was passed.

"There is a very high percentage of people who speak French here. When Canadian Tire opened in November on Highway 17, many people said they didn't want to do business with stores that had English signs only. I believe that businesses will provide what their clientele is requesting."

Mr. Bisson said he hasn't received any complaints about the new sign bylaw, which takes effect this week.

Chris Gleeson, a spokesman for the Ontario Ministry of Municipal Affairs, said he can't say whether Clarence-Rockland is the first municipality to approve a bilingual business sign bylaw, but the Municipal Act gives it the power to do so.

"Section 99 of the Municipal Act gives municipalities the power to regulate signs, notices and posters," he said. "A bylaw may regulate the message, content and nature of signs and advertising devices. I can't say whether this violates freedom of _expression under the Canadian Charter of Rights. Somebody would have to challenge the city and go in front of a judge to find out."

© The Ottawa Citizen 2005


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Rockland Now Requires Bilingual Business Signs
Josh Pringle
Thursday, January 13, 2005

Clarence-Rockland is likely the first Ontario municipality to regulate the language on business signs.

A bylaw has been passed requiring new businesses in the town to post signs that give equal prominence to French and English.

Businesses that fail to comply with the new sign bylaw will face fines up to five-thousand dollars.

Clarence-Rockland will have its own bylaw enforcement officers to check signs to make sure the wording meets the city's language requirements.

Existing businesses will be able to keep their current signs, but will have to meet the bilingualism requirements if they change them.

Mayor Richard Lalonde says the city has the power to institute the sign regulations, under the provincial Municipal Affairs Act.

Nicefolks,

Please don't flood the forum with this stuff! Instead of starting all these different posts, I would appreciate it if you put them all in one since they're all related anyways.

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Are you there?

Can it be cleaned up at your end.

You can repost everything here and I'll take care of the duplicates.

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Are you there?

Nurses fired after years of good service!!!
Mon, January 10, 2005

Intolerant in Quebec

Nurses bear brunt of Liberal notwithstanding hypocrisy



By Ezra Levant -- Calgary Sun
Remember this the next time a Liberal criticizes a Conservative for intolerance, or for using the notwithstanding clause of the Charter to violate basic rights: The Quebec Liberal government of Jean Charest just fired two nurses from an English hospital because they failed a written French exam.

The two nurses at the Jewish General Hospital in Montreal spoke excellent French.

They worked there for years, satisfying patients of every stripe. The hospital liked them. But Charest, looking to out-separatist the separatists, needed a few anglo scapegoats to prop up his support in the polls.

So Elizabeth Davantes, a nurse with 15 years' experience, was fired. She'll have to leave Quebec to find work, and so will Eulin Gumbs, also fired and stripped of her credentials. Though they spoke French fluently, their written French grammar just wasn't up to snuff for the inquisitors at Charest's Office de la langue Francais.

If this bigotry had been done by the Parti Quebecois or the Bloc Quebecois, Paul Martin would be on the warpath. But it was done by Charest, a Liberal, so there's nary a peep from Ottawa.

That's one way to look at it: What if separatists abused anglos this way? But the far more striking comparison would be more obvious: What if a government elsewhere in Canada treated a French nurse this way?

Canada employs a full-time official languages commissioner to do nothing but nudge and hassle anyone who doesn't use French, even in bizarre circumstances.

Few things are more odd, for example, than flying from Vancouver to Calgary -- where English is spoken by the vast majority of the passengers, and Chinese by the rest -- and hearing Transport Canada instructions broadcast in French. French radio stations are subsidized throughout the prairies, where German and Ukrainian are more often spoken than French. Fire a French nurse for not having perfect written grammar?

It would be the top story on the CBC for a week.

It's worth remembering the worst of Quebec's language excesses were implemented by the Liberals, not the separatist PQ. Bill 101, the rule that Charest is ruthlessly implementing again, was brought in by the Liberals. Distinct Society, too, was a Liberal idea -- the separatists just wanted to separate.

Charest has never been popular with francophones in his own province -- he won only because anglophones religiously vote Liberal.

This is a cheap shot, and these two nurses are fodder. The fact that Quebec already faces a shortage of approximately 1,500 nurses obviously doesn't bother Charest.

These nurses weren't just fired. They were stripped of their licence to practise -- as if written French grammar was an essential element of nursing. Gumbs is a single mother of two who, like Davantes, must now leave the province to work.

Say: Where are all of Canada's Charter of Rights lovers now? Where are those who say that to use the notwithstanding clause to abridge fundamental freedoms is an abomination? Where are those who say government must not be allowed to trample basic rights -- such as the newly minted right to gay marriage?

Stephen Harper was roughed up in the last election for allegedly considering using the clause. Charest is using it now to mete out an otherwise unconstitutional punishment -- to silent consent in the press corps.

Don't forget that the next time Liberals, or Quebecers, or Quebec Liberals, start talking about tolerance, freedoms and the notwithstanding clause.



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The Ottawa Citizen
January 10, 2005

The Quebec follies


Quebec's language police have been confounding Quebecers and non-Quebecers alike for decades. But the latest stunt to come out of la belle province shows how self-defeating the politics of language has become.

The case involves two nurses in Montreal who, by all accounts, are perfectly competent at their jobs, but who are being forced to leave their hospital and probably the province because they failed a written test of their French skills. What makes the story especially ridiculous is that both nurses work at an English hospital, the Jewish General.

Ideological extremism is a destructive thing, crowding out common sense. In the case of these nurses, such extremism shows there are some Quebec nationalists who have made such a fetish of language that they believe the ability to conjugate verbs is a greater public service than the ability to save lives.

The revocation of the nurses' licences comes in the wake of a warning from Quebec's Office de la langue francaise that French is not sufficiently strong in Quebec workplaces. Maybe that's true. But considering the state of Canada's heath-care system, one has to question whether Quebec has its priorities right. Taken to its (il)logical extreme, such narrow-minded devotion to linguistic skills would see emergency workers such as firefighters being dismissed simply because they forgot to put an accent on oxygene during a written test.

Besides, both nurses reportedly can converse in French. But the pair have repeatedly failed the written part of their language exam. This is not unusual. You learn a second language by living among native speakers, as these nurses have done, but to develop a high written literacy you generally have to be educated in the language, an option not easily available to adults.
Obviously, some jobs require that kind of written fluency -- penning editorials for a French-language newspaper, for example, or writing speeches for Premier Jean Charest. But nursing in an English hospital? You'd think the language police, and the Quebec Order of Nurses which is enforcing the regulations, could find a way to accommodate these sorts of cases -- especially when a huge cohort of Quebec nurses is expected to retire in the next few years.

But there will be no accommodation. Accommodation signals compromise and flexibility, qualities that seem to have been purged from language debates in Quebec. Most reasonable Canadians would agree that the French language is an important part of our national heritage and that Quebec has a right to protect it. But the self-appointed guardians must be careful not to make French into a kind of holy tongue, whereby one becomes burdened with a civic duty to die from an infection rather than be treated by a health worker who sometimes gets her tenses mixed up.

© The Ottawa Citizen 2005

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And another thing... if you ever get a ticket from a Quebec cop, pay it immediately, no matter whether you think it is reasonable. They increase their fines exponentially if you don't. The story attached below demonstrates that, if ignored, these fines can make you a nationally wanted criminal. Read the excerpt below from a Citizen story (Jan/9/05), entitled "Tough Love"

1. http://www.canada.com/ottawa/ottawacitizen/news/story.html?id=133cc704-6bb4-489f-9e52-0b094feb1d52&page=5

Link to Page 5 of Online article in Ottawa Citizen Jan 9, 2005 - titled "Tough Love"

......But it wasn't an uneventful journey. Her former brother-in-law, an Australian with a yen to see New York, offered to drive her to New York but at the Prescott border U.S. immigration refused him entry. There was, according to a U.S. immigration officer, a nationwide warrant out for his arrest in Canada. At least that's what the computer said.

"It was a total shock," says Di Felice, "but years before when he had been living in Ottawa, he had put a 'For Sale' sign, in English, in the window of his car. He drove over to Hull on business and a police officer had given him a ticket for displaying a unilingual English sign on his car. They sent a ticket to his home in Ottawa, in French only, so he threw it in the garbage in disgust and thought no more about it. Over the years it had apparently become a national warrant."

After explaining their predicament, her brother-in-law was given 24 hours to get to Manhattan and back to Canada.

"We had to plead," she says, "and it was only because the immigration agent's sister was a teacher that they took pity on me."

see above

Coming to a school and town near you !!
7 January 2005
Cathie Whyte

Principal

Riverview Public School

Cumberland, ON

Dear Mrs. Whyte:

Today, my children informed me that you could not play the National Anthem for the school because you only had a French version CD and that you would attempt to get a bilingual version CD. This dilemma solicits a number of questions in my confused mind.

First, since when is it necessary to have a CD to sing the National Anthem?

Second, since Riverview Public School, or whatever it is called now, is an English language public school; at least it was when I registered my children there, why would you want a bilingual version of the National Anthem?

The English version of the National Anthem should be sung for the whole school (the original version - not the politically correct version), while the French version should be reserved for the French class. If you do not have the words for the English version, it can easily be obtained on the Internet, printed and distributed to each pupil in the school. It would be a very good exercise in developing the national pride that is sorely lacking in this country and especially among our youth, which is where it begins, mostly due to sorely skewed socialist political correctness.

If I wanted my children to be in a bilingual school I would have sent them to one. I registered them in an English language Public School so they can be properly educated in English and learn French in a proper French class from a proper French teacher. However, I received a note this week indicating that proper French spelling is no longer important in the French class, presumably because it takes too much of the teachers time, or perhaps because proper spelling just isn’t important anymore.
Is it a wonder that Public schools consistently rate low in the annual evaluations? Is it a wonder that children are so confused when they come out of school, if not totally screwed up? It seems to me that for too long now schools have not been institutions of teaching / learning but rather places of employment for people looking for well paid, secure employment with more time off than any other profession on earth and where children are just a pain in the butt. And now teachers are looking for yet even less classroom time and more preparation time. Isn’t that wonderful? For that, we have the powerful Teachers’ Federations, spineless politicians and biased bureaucrats to thank. Simply put, the teaching "vocation" just doesn’t exist anymore.

Sincerely,

<< OLE Object: MSDraw.1.01 >>

Name deleted

c.c.

Superintendent of Instruction (Schools): Larry Archibald
Area Trustee: Sheryl MacDonald (ZONE 8)

<< File: National Anthem.doc >>



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RUSSELL TOWNSHIP COUNCIL MEETING

DECEMBER 21, 2004.


This is a short summary of the events that happened on December, 21, 2004 at 7 pm.

<>It was to be the final meeting of the year for us, and we had a fairly heavy agenda. One of the items on the agenda was to approve a hiring policy for the municipality. To explain a bit of the situation that the municipal council was in, the province of Ontario has directed all municipalities with the need to have set policies for various disciplines. Such as Purchasing, Hiring, Service and Supply and about half a dozen other policies that have to be done up before the next year or two.

The Purchasing and Hiring policy were required to be completed and passed by Dec 31, 2004. The Clerk of the municipality had put together the policy and other documents to be voted on at the meeting. The Hiring policy had been dealt with in a workshop, or committee of the whole, two weeks prior to the meeting, when it was going to be voted on. It had also been given to each member of the council two weeks prior to the workshop. This gave more then ample time to bring up any concerns about the two policies at the workshop. At that workshop meeting, the Clerk also proposed a protocol which was agreed upon, on the fashion to bringing up concerns, about various issues, to be brought to the various heads of departments previous to any public meetings.

<>The night of the public meeting, the town hall was full as usual, but the crowd was different. You get used to seeing a specific crowd, but this one was not quite the norm. Plus there was a CBC camera man by himself, who taped a few minutes of the meeting.

We started the meeting and did the normal stuff. Then we got to the hiring policy. By that time, the camera man had left. There was not supposed to be any surprises on passing this policy because as I said, it was a directive of the province to have this completed before January 2005, and all concerns were supposed to have been brought up at the workshop.

<>At the reading of the by-law, that was bringing the policy into effect immediately, one councillor, Lorraine Dicaire asked for three amendments to the policy.

The first amendment that councilor Dicaire asked for, was to make every department head designated as bilingual.


The next two amendments affected Section 7 of the policy, which reads in part like this:<>


7. Development of Tests and Interviews Questionnaire<äº Ò†î̧춬瘡ᰰૺ芰ૹ>

The Department Head and the Director of Corporate Services shall prepare all the necessary information required for the tests and the interview questionnaire.

Each candidate shall undergo French and/or English oral and written tests and/or any other tests before, during and/or after the interview if applicable to the position. These tests shall have a predetermined time limit and shall also clearly indicate how they will be assessed (for example: spelling, content and style of the answer, precision and accuracy of data or calculation, etc.)


The interview questionnaire shall consist of general or precise questions and role-plays related to the job description of the position to fill. (End of section 7 copy)


The second and third amendments that was requested by councilor Dicaire, were basically the same. It consisted of taking part of the phrase in specific paragraphs, such as in Section 7, where it says “French and/or English†and change it to “French and English†.

<>Amendment 2 & 3 would have designated every job in the municipality from a department head, to the broom pusher or truck driver, as having to be bilingual. The drivers or any other daily worker in the municipality will never have official municipal business with anyone in the public. Yet, they will have to pass written and oral tests in both languages, as if they would be dealing with an administrative position.

This was the reason why the crowd that was there was so different. They were there at the request of councilor Dicaire who had called in the troops in the hope that their presence would pressure us, those on council who do not agree with her “political agenda†, to force us into submission. There must have been the belief that we would accept these amendments without question, due to the severity of the moment on needing this policy accepted, before the deadline imposed by the province.

This is the making of legislation through the back door. The Hiring policy is a simple document that will establish the basic rules on the process of how we will be hiring people for various positions in the municipality. It is the first document in a series of policies that will be following in the future. But, they must be done separately from this one. Suffice it to say, the vote ended up in a tie and the policy was not accepted that night, and still remains as such.


<>We will eventually debate the bilingual aspect of the municipality, on the people that we will be hiring in the future. But that debate must be public and advertised, so that the taxpayers are made aware of when and where we will be debating this issue, and of the cost that is involved with the undertaking, should we end up with a fully bilingual municipality.

What councillor Dicaire has tried to do is to circumvent all public debate, and even private ones, with her fellow council members, and push through an agenda specific to her vision of what the municipality should be. And damn the opinions of anybody else?! Apparently they don’t seem to matter except for those that agree with her.

<>Under the guise “We must have bilingualism in the municipality in order to protect the French language!†councillor Dicaire believes that a dictatorial action is warranted.

When I see this type of action by a member of a municipal government, who is close to scrutiny by everyone from the public, the municipal staff and their fellow council members, I can easily understand why the present laws in this country are the way they are. From the fashion in which they are made, enforced and judicially decided upon, it has become so out of context on protecting individual rights and are now focused on minority rights.

<>Anyone who believes it is proper to bring about any legislation in the fashion that the bilingual policy was intended to be introduced through the back door as this one was, does not realize at all the true meaning of Common Law, even Democracy for that matter.
<>

Jean-Serge Brisson
Councillor
Municipality of
Russell Township
Ontario.