Humbug

"It's a serious problem.  Making bilingualism a requirement for hiring worries me...  I have the impression we've gone a bit too far.  When bilingualism moves into the workplace, for reasons that aren't valid, we're getting to the point where it'll also move into society."  
Diane de Courcy, Parti Quebecoise Minister of Immigration, Quebec

On first reading the naive might think: good grief, that's what we've been complaining about in the rest of Canada since forever.  Particularly unilingual anglophones who are more than adequately suited to positions in government who find themselves out out of employment because most employment opportunities of any note in the federal government are bilingual imperative.

At the very least in the public service some French ability is required.  This is so because Canada has been mandated an officially bilingual country.  And the country has long embarked on a mission to create a bilingual population.  Propelled for the most part by a desire to pacify French Quebec which has always chafed at the notion that their language is treated as second-class.

In mollifying Quebec, it was reasoned, there would be the priceless dividend of peace between the 'two solitudes'.  Of course, nothing of the sort ever happened.  Quebec separatists simply found other plaints, other reasons to insist that they were  being short-changed, other accusations with which to clout the anglophone majority.  All reasons to campaign for sovereignty.

And now that a sovereignty-occupied political party is back in power in Quebec, a miracle has occurred.  A PQ cabinet minister musing over the unfairness of employment bilingualism.  And then reality - as it has an irritating habit of doing - set in.  Quebec, which focuses on unilingualism and sees no need to protect English in a majority francophone province, rebels at the notion that English be required of French job-seekers.

It is not right, it is unfair.  Forty years of the rest of Canada making a concerted effort to appease Quebec, strenuously attempting to teach schoolchildren basic French, hoping they will become proficient as two languages always trump one; spending countless millions on translation services, producing bilingual literature and servicing francophones in the language of their choice, is nothing and less than nothing.

For the Parti Quebecois has little but contempt for the striving and the results.  Nothing will satisfy them but separation, nothing but achieving that national identity that has meaning to them.  It is truly ludicrous that the province names its provincial parks 'national', that it is the National Assembly their provincial legislature is named, that they have been graced with recognition as a unique 'nation' within Canada.

In Quebec it is completely legitimate for those in public service to refuse to speak English to English-speakers to enable complete comfort and understanding.  But the reverse, needless to say, raises hell, should instances of francophones living in majority anglophone communities not be served in the 'language of choice'.