Looks like us "dead ducks" won't be snowmobiling in Québec

In one of the weird twists of Canadian language battles, the Globe and Mail reported that French-speaking residents of Eastern Ontario are upset at the government of Québec sending them flyers about snowmobile trails... in English.

The reason, says La Belle Province, is that Ontario is part of English Canada. As it happens, however, a substantial proportion of the population there has French as a first language. In fact, the area is a bastion of French-language rights. It's also been a hotbed of protest and backlash: just a few years ago in Clarence-Rockland, where 68 per cent of the population is francophone, the issue of mandatory bilingual signage brought things to a boil in 2005.

The president of the main Franco-Ontarian lobby group seemed incredulous that the Québec government wouldn't want to maintain ties with francophones minorities elsewhere. However, most of us who have lived through the language wars and politics in Canada know exactly why it wouldn't.

Québec separatists prefer to pretend there are no French-speaking people outside their borders, to justify whatever they do to their own English-language minority. There's one exception: when it suits the Bloc québécois to justify the province's language laws by pointing to Canadian failings in the matter of providing French-language services elsewhere in the country. Whenever this happens, you'd think the separatists are our very own knights in shining armour. The rest of the time, the BQ follows the lead of Parti québécois founder René Lévesque, who called us "dead ducks", and author Yves Beauchemin, to whom we are "a corpse that is still warm". In other words: we're an embarrassing obstacle to the PQ objective of a purely French Québec that might just have to respect its English-language minority as much as the rest of Canada should respect us. We're inconvenient that way.

Even more disheartening was to read the majority of comments on the Globe website following the article. Apparently anyone expressing a desire to receive information in French is a "whiner". This is exactly the type of attitude that fuels separatism in Québec and unravels our distinctive bilingual heritage in Canada.

Meanwhile, according to the same article, it seems Canadian Tire and Loblaws are better at serving people in the language they're more likely to use. Too bad they don't arrange snowmobiling tours. It looks like Québec will see a few fewer Ontarians on their trails this year.