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kool maudit;5366641]you know, as a young, anglophone guy who works in the english media, a certain percentage of canadians from outside the city ask me why i stay here, you know, why i put up with the language laws, the smallish english-language job pool.
they wonder why i swim against the tide, canada-wise, why i bother with a city that gives up a lot to other places on paper.
to those for whom it isn't self-explanatory, it generally isn't explainable at all.
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Once in Nova Scotia, stopping at an antique shop in a small town near Lunenburg, I was questioned by the owner about why anglophones were so badly treated in Montreal, by which he meant
not served in the english language. This selfsame righter of wrongs never thought once of either greeting me or speaking to me in french. I never bothered answering his query. I am very hard-headed and yet pleased with my lack of allegiance to either french or english because I always enjoyed using both. This two-headed monster of a city will always irk people in this way. There is a diplomacy here that extends far beyond the vapid enactment of language laws. Folks here have managed for centuries a proximity that demanded attention and reciprocal acts of respect. We speak of two solitudes in Canada, and this is where you find the strangest of cohabitation. I had a friend in college here who decamped to the west coast a long time ago who liked to remind me that bilingualism in Vancouver meant speaking chinese after english, because he was unfortunately too stubborn or ill-at-ease to learn french at home in Quebec. His last name is french and his mother taught french in an english high school, but his siblings never really cared for it, nor his parents by the way, growing up in DDO. Some people 30 years ago before the migration to Toronto and points west had very little use for french other than decorative. Nowadays, the french and english who remain, and have an emotional stake in the city are bound by other values, and their future in this city will be increasingly tied to how much give
as opposed to how much take there is. This is where the strength of this city lies, the two cultures managed to share like few other places maybe because of the predominance of english on the continent and the anglo power elite of yore. New Orleans suffered the removal of french from its midst and cities with large hispanic footholds in the US are becoming ripe for this biculturalism, but it is not an easy task for anglos continent-wide to learn minority languages at par.
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