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It’s about the
jobs in Russel
By Art Mantell
I feel rather sorry for the people of Russell
Township.
A storm is brewing over language rights and
it has been a long time coming.
First there was the battle to get and keep a
separate school board. The francophones won. Then
the battle was to keep Montford Hosital a francophone
institution. The francophones won. Then there
was the battle to have bilingual signs put over
all businesses in the eastern area around Orleans.
An anglophone mayor with a francophone wife cast
the deciding ballot at a recent council meeting
and the francophones appeared to have won again.
Now many would say that it’s a linguistic
matter, that it’s a constitutional affair.
But it’s not. Not any longer. Not in Ontario.
It’s an economic matter pure and simple.
Francophone leaders learned from the Quebec language
battles over the last 50 years that if you control
institutions you get to hire the people who run
them. It’s jobs, jobs, jobs. Look at the
federal civil service as the ultimate example.
Francophones are everywhere thanks to the federal
bilingualism program. In the early 1960s countless
senior anglophone civil servants were shunted
aside, told they couldn’t run departments
and their successor would be speaking French.
The province of Quebec showed how much you could
push the disorganized anglophone minority –
and win away their jobs. The zealots who controlled
the legislature first drove anglophones by the
thousands out of the country through fear, then
brutalized the remaining minority through legislation.
Now the anglophones of Eastern Ontario are the
new target. Soon francophones will be demanding
bilingual municipal departments. That calls for
bilingual employees. That means no non-francophones
need apply. There go their jobs, jobs, jobs.
Yet the francophone spokespeople will say there
is nothing about their aims or intentions other
than justice for their people. Don’t you
believe it. It’s all about jobs and the
power that goes with the jobs.
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