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View Poll Results: Should Ottawa be officially bilingual?
Yes, Ottawa should be officially bilingual. 112 56.00%
No, Ottawa should not be officially bilingual. 63 31.50%
Yes, Gatineau should take the same initiative. 62 31.00%
No, gatineau should not take the same initiative. 17 8.50%
Multiple Choice Poll. Voters: 200. You may not vote on this poll

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  #921  
Old Posted Mar 23, 2017, 5:18 PM
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Originally Posted by kwoldtimer View Post
I would very much like to see the details of where/how this has happened. I have never encountered a unilingual francophone in a public service position in Ontario and find the idea rather bizarre. At least in the case of the federal public servants resident and working in Ontario, I have never encountered a francophone who was not bilingual (to a least a functional level) and have to think that unilinguals would be perishingly rare.
It's quite conceivable that you might run into Tante Georgette who speaks only French helping out with the family bakery in Hawkesbury, Hearst or even Vanier, but even that's quite rare.

In a public position, though, that's basically unthinkable.

It might happen once in a blue moon in Ottawa that a bilingual employee might address someone in French first (on the assumption that they're part of a larger group that are francophones), but once that assumption is proven wrong they'd always switch to English.
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  #922  
Old Posted Mar 23, 2017, 5:21 PM
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Originally Posted by Acajack View Post
It's quite conceivable that you might run into Tante Georgette who speaks only French helping out with the family bakery in Hawkesbury, Hearst or even Vanier, but even that's quite rare.

In a public position, though, that's basically unthinkable.

It might happen once in a blue moon in Ottawa that a bilingual employee might address someone in French first (on the assumption that they're part of a larger group that are francophones), but once that assumption is proven wrong they'd always switch to English.
That's my view, and I assume he's referring to government services as private services are not relevant. I suppose you could encounter a civil servant who CAN speak English but refused to (civil servants are human and can behave badly, inappropriately, or even illegally), but I think as I said that examples would have to be perishingly rare.
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  #923  
Old Posted Mar 24, 2017, 2:00 AM
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Originally Posted by Acajack View Post
It's quite conceivable that you might run into Tante Georgette who speaks only French helping out with the family bakery in Hawkesbury, Hearst or even Vanier, but even that's quite rare.

In a public position, though, that's basically unthinkable.

It might happen once in a blue moon in Ottawa that a bilingual employee might address someone in French first (on the assumption that they're part of a larger group that are francophones), but once that assumption is proven wrong they'd always switch to English.
The same goes for Timmins as well. You won't see in-person service only in French anywhere. Although we have had a few places (private businesses and community organizations) that greeted with "Bonjour" only that made anglphones and even many francophones not happy.

I work in a federal government office in Timmins and can say that the people doing in-person service are almost always bilingual and a few are English speaking-only but will get somebody who speaks French to serve the client right away if needed.

We do have a few people who when they started were pretty much French speaking-only are are originally from Hearst, ON or Quebec. Most people in our office correspond with clients either with letters or by telephone. So we do need people with strong French-language skills who can produce letters that would pass the test in Quebec as quite a few francophones in Ontario are originally from Quebec. The interesting thing is that my co-workers who originally worked only in French all learned to speak English quite well but are in high demand for working in French.
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  #924  
Old Posted Jun 13, 2019, 2:40 PM
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This kind of fits here. The biggest public school board in Ottawa is looking into its French immersion offering and whether or not it creates too classes of kids: the "good students" who are all in French immersion and the "weak students" who are in the regular English program.

I think the short answer to that is probably yes, though that's pretty much inevitable when you have different streams that are tailored to kids' ability to learn quickly or more slowly. Personally I think these programs whether they are French immersion, "for the gifted", "enriched" or whatever, are generally desirable.

But obviously with French immersion the usual suspects come out of the woodwork. The comments section for this article is overwhelmingly negative, especially surprising when you consider how popular French immersion is with many parents in the Ottawa area.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottaw...cdsb-1.5168764

It's funny (sorta) to see how the classic borderline francophobic comments emerge almost like clockwork:

- this was all settled on the Plains of Abraham, and they lost!

- the French takeover is underway, we must resist!

- Mandarin would be more useful than French (in Ottawa??????)
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  #925  
Old Posted Jun 13, 2019, 2:58 PM
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^ It is a legitimate question. Part of the reason for the popularity of French Immersion in Manitoba is at least in part because it gives kids a de facto private school experience in a public school setting. And as a parent I can appreciate the appeal of that type of set-up... just about any classroom setting would be markedly improved if you took the one or two loudest, most disruptive kids out of it. But whether that is fair or not is another issue.
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  #926  
Old Posted Jun 13, 2019, 3:19 PM
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^ It is a legitimate question. Part of the reason for the popularity of French Immersion in Manitoba is at least in part because it gives kids a de facto private school experience in a public school setting. And as a parent I can appreciate the appeal of that type of set-up... just about any classroom setting would be markedly improved if you took the one or two loudest, most disruptive kids out of it. But whether that is fair or not is another issue.
Oh I would agree it's a good question. It just gets inflamed because there is the added issue of the perception that the program itself exists in order to kowtow to "the other guy". You don't have that element when you're talking about an enriched math or informatics stream.

OTOH as a parent I have related before on here (at the price of a certain amount of personal popularity among fellow forumers) that my kids were often hampered in their education by the presence of 1-2 (sometimes more) highly disruptive kids in their classes. Basically a lot of the time the teacher devoted a significant proportion of her/his attention to only a handful of kids out of a class of 25. In our case at least the problem was more acute in elementary than in high school, where we are now.

I suppose if I look on the bright side it taught my kids to be more resourceful and self-motivated. Though it did bug me because they have the same rights as any other kid to teacher attention and support. And they only rarely got much of that.
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  #927  
Old Posted Jun 14, 2019, 5:39 AM
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Francophone privilege at it again smh
OMG
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  #928  
Old Posted Jun 14, 2019, 3:28 PM
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Acajack's stalker back at it
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  #929  
Old Posted Jun 14, 2019, 3:32 PM
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Acajack's stalker back at it
Guys like that are no match for me.
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