Katherine d’Entremont Demon Villain or Victim of Circumstances

By André Faust The Left Eye

Why has Katherine d’Entremont become one New Brunswick most despised person, Granted she set herself up when she laid a complaint to herself against long time employee Wayne Grant because he couldn’t speak French, No matter how you cut it that one was un faux pas.

Why bilingualism has become a problem has more to do with New Brunswick economics then d’Entremont, more precisely the problem of bilingualism due to the scarcity of employment in the province, not all New Brunswickers are technological geeks and cannot take advantage of the emerging technological industries when you start make decisions that negatively effects ones livelihood you’re going to have problems.

By virtue of trying to uphold the Official Languages of Canada as set forth in The Constitution Act of 1982 section 16 through to section 22 in an  impoverished Province  with an unemployment rate of 10.2%. Which is based on those who are drawing unemployment Insurance the figure doesn’t include students, and those who have given up looking for work, the real figure is much greater if the employment rate was much lower bilingualism would not be as big of an issue as it is.
The perception that the English community is having, is that economic advantages are being giving to the French members of the community.

Common sense observation seems to reinforce that perception, when you walk into a government office, two things are immediately obvious, one is the French accent the other French is spoken first. If equality existed you would expect to see as many government employees who native tongue is English and French is the second language as you see government employees whose native tongue is French and English is the second language.

Then comes the question of proficiency, it appears that an Anglophone has to be more than proficient in French while the Francophone only needs to be at max functionally proficient in English to qualify for or maintain employment with the government.

What adds salt to the injury is when people are being fired because they are not bilingual which on the surface seems to be only the unilingual English speakers that are being sacked from their jobs because they can’t communicate in French. There are no known reported cases where a French unilingual person is dismissed from their jobs because they can’t speak English.
Ideally speaking,  the province should make funds available to allow New Brunswickers whether English or French to take courses to be functionally bilingual, those who are currently employed with government should receive the financial support so they can take courses to become bilingual,  canning them from their jobs is not the solution!  At present there is no financial incentives for unilingual persons to study language that they are weak in or have no knowledge of the language.

Obviously the province can’t afford to invest in its citizens to become bilingual the money would have to come from the Federal government to make that a reality.  By the fact that New Brunswick specifically is included in the constitution makes it a distinctive province like Quebec and it needs to be treated as such from the Federal Government.  The Federal Government needs to kick in a half a billion dollars over the course of “X” number of years to allow New Brunswick to fully comply with the constitution without creating a division between the two linguistic groups.

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