RCMP Officers in New Brunswick must learn to speak French

[Mischief007]

Interesting read. I don't agree with that woman. So now New Brunswick will have less RCMP officers on the road because they will have to go to school to learn French. Very well done, I applaud the idiot. She lives in a country where the majority of the people speak English and is their mother tongue. Maybe we should also start forcing RCMP officers to also know German, Polish, Chinese, Vietnamese, Hebrew, etc... This way no one will have to learn the English language. :vxd: :gaa:

http://www.cbc.ca/story/canada/national/2005/10/10/bilingualRCMP2051010.html

[Exmortis]

Do you even know the proportion of french/english there is in NB? How is an english-only officer supposed to communicate with the people of north-NB?

[frostyone]

Have you ever been to New Brunswick?

Ever heard of Acadians ?
A full third of province has French as their mother language.

16.1. (1) The English linguistic community and the French linguistic community in New Brunswick have equality of status and equal rights and privileges,

19. (2) Either English or French may be used by any person in, or in any pleading in or process issuing from, any court of New Brunswick.
http://www.gnb.ca/Cour/Languages-e.asp

[reiver]

Bienvenue chez Canada!

It's amazing how insulated people in the GTA are from the rest of the country.... I have relatives that have been turned down for jobs in both eastern Ontario and New Brunswick, because although they speak the required amount of French, there were other candidates who were more proficient. It's a relality when you're applying for many jobs in this country.

At least these officers are given the "option" of learning the language to keep their jobs.

[andyman]

I thought they were already required to speak both official languages.
I guess I should point out that there are a lot of French in northern Ontario and Manitoba.
maybe I thought that because while living out West I bumped into more RCs with French accents than English.
PS it is her right as a Canadian to be addressed in the Language she is more comfortable in.

[Tim]

<cue liberal swipe useless gibber from Wally>
;)



I don't see why anyone would be offended by a provice that has a huge french population requiring officers dealing with the public speak french. None of the other languages are official languages in Canada.

[Swordfish]

lol Tim. :d

I'm lucky I live in a part of Ontario where I dont half to worry about speaking french, however in grade school we had to atleast learn basic french that really wouldnt bother me...alot of my US friends ask if I speak french

[Quintin]

Don't know what the problem is, they have the C-division in quebec seems they might have a recruitment issue for NB

[normon]

New Brunswick is the only bilingual province in canada

why people living in new brunswick should not be serve in there language it's
should be a law that the RCMP should serve us french people in their language

most the people of New Brunswick enderstand read the English language BUT we got the write to be serve in our language that is Francais S.V.P. (french Please)

normon

[Ottawaman]

Canada's tenuous French connection
BRODIE FENLON
GLOBE AND MAIL UPDATE
DECEMBER 4, 2007 AT 4:12 PM EST
Just a day after the Prime Minister appointed Bernard Lord to head a committee on
bilingualism, newly released census figures suggest that Canada's official-languages policy
and the vitality of the French language are under increasing pressure outside Quebec.
There are nearly as many Canadians with a non-official language as their mother tongue as
there are francophones, while the peak rate of bilingualism for anglophones living outside
Quebec has dropped again.
The new figures on immigration, language and mobility, gleaned from the 2006 census, paint
a dramatic picture of Canada's changing demographics. Among the highlights:
• One in five Canadians – 19.8 per cent of the total population – was born outside the
country, a rate not matched since 1931, when the percentage of foreign-born citizens peaked
at 22.2 per cent. Only Australia has more foreign-born residents.
Enlarge Image
With an increase of 18.5 per cent, more than one million people now report Chinese as their
mother tongue. (Steve White/CP files)
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Earlier discussion: Census discussion with director-general of the census program branch
of Statistics Canada
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Statistics Canada
Statscan Census Page

• More than 60 per cent of immigrants live in the large urban centres of Montreal, Toronto
and Vancouver; only about 5 per cent live in rural parts of Canada.
• Most of the recent newcomers to Canada are from Asia – 58 per cent when those from the
Middle East are included. Europeans, the dominant immigrant group for most of the 20th
century, represented only 16 per cent of those who moved to Canada between 2001 and 2006.
• Canada's foreign-born population increased by 13.6 per cent, four times greater than the
growth rate of 3.3 per cent for the Canadian-born population.
But it is the language numbers released Tuesday that will likely make headlines, following as
they do on the heels of Mr. Lord's appointment by Stephen Harper to head a high-profile
committee on bilingualism in Canada.
The former premier of New Brunswick will travel to seven cities across the country during
the first two weeks of December to speak to members of English and French minority
communities and provide advice and guidance to the federal government.
Mr. Lord will then report to Official Languages Minister Jos&#233;e Verner in January.
What Mr. Lord will find outside Quebec and New Brunswick, Canada's only officially
bilingual province, is increasingly isolated French-language communities, the census
suggests.
One indicator is mother tongue, defined as the first language learned at home and still
understood at the time of the census.
For the first time, allophones – those who speak neither English nor French as their first
language – represent fully one-fifth of the population. The numbers jumped to 20.1 per cent
from 18 per cent in the last census, driven primarily by immigration. Conversely, the
proportion of francophones and anglophones decreased slightly after population growth is
taken into account.
This will be no surprise for Canadians in many parts of the country. For several years,
Chinese has topped French as a first language in Ontario, Alberta and B.C.
The 2006 census reaffirmed the position of Chinese languages as Canada's third most
common mother tongue group. More than one million Canadians reported one of the Chinese
languages as their first language, a jump of 18.5 per cent.
Experts are quick to note that allophones speak about 200 languages and are not a
homogeneous group. Francophones still represent about one-quarter of the population; people
who report Chinese as their mother tongue represent 3.3 per cent of the total population.
Moreover, the census showed that nine out of 10 Canadians speak English or French most
often at home: Just over one-fifth spoke French, 67.7 per cent spoke English, and 11.9 per
cent spoke a non-official language at home. It is important to note, however, that the English
and French numbers dropped from the previous census, while the non-official language
numbers increased by 1.5 per cent.
Even in Quebec, the percentage of people who spoke French most often at home dropped to
81.8 per cent from 83.1 per cent.
The bilingualism rate is another indicator of the tenuous French connection.
Outside Quebec, only 5.6 per cent of allophones in 2006 reported knowing both official
languages. While there was a slight increase – 7.4 per cent from 7.1 per cent – in the number
of anglophones outside Quebec who said they could carry on a conversation in both official
languages, the number dropped for a key demographic: young Canadians.
Because most anglophones learn French at school, the peak bilingualism rate for Canadians
outside Quebec occurs in the 15-19 age range. That rate has slipped over the past decade, to
13 per cent in 2006 from 16.3 per cent in 1996.
The ability of young anglophones to maintain their knowledge of French as a second
language appears to decline with time. In 2001, 14.7 per cent of anglophones aged 15 to 19
were bilingual. Five years later, only 12.2 per cent of that same cohort reported being
bilingual.
The numbers are disappointing, considering that one of the chief objectives of Ottawa's $787-
million plan on official languages – launched by the previous Liberal government in 2003 – is
to double by 2013 the percentage of young bilingual Canadians to 50 per cent.
Jack Jedwab, executive director of the Association for Canadian Studies and advocate of
official bilingualism, warned against an “ethno-local” reading of the numbers, which he said
could foster tensions and challenge public support for French in areas where other languages
dominate.
“When you start breaking things down locally, then you risk tearing away at the fabric of
national unity. ... That's the Canada of multiple parts, not the Canada with a national vision
both of its demographic reality and its history,” he said.
“Bilingualism is the fundamental feature of a strong Canadian identity to the extent that more
than a quarter of the country, nationally, consists of people who are French speakers.”
Others suggest, however, that such sentiments are antiquated in a multicultural Canada and
census2006/home?cid=al_gam_mostview
ignore the demographic reality of much of the country, especially urban areas such as
Toronto or Vancouver.
“Nobody's asked any longer what is the place of French. Now I walk on hot coals to even say
that out loud,” said Heather Lotherington, associate professor of multilingual education at
York University.
“We're living in a global society. We have this influx of people who speak the languages of
the world, and we're not doing a damn thing with these languages. We're just letting them go
to waste.”
Ms. Lotherington, whose research is focused on Toronto-area schools, advocates for the
inclusion of students' mother tongues in the curriculum. She said decades of research shows
that if you maintain the languages children know, they learn other languages better, fast and
more easily.
“French immersion needs to be looked at critically,” she said. “I do not want to throw it out.
Canada is a world leader in immersion education. But you have to think about the way we
learn languages and the possibility of learning more.
"It's a very colonial stance to say that English and French are the languages of Canada.”
Concerns about official bilingualism and the impact of immigration on the French language
inside and outside Quebec are not new.
In September's Throne Speech, the Prime Minister pledged to extend official bilingualism
programs for minority communities.
The appointment of Mr. Lord is seen as the first step in that commitment and a response to
the critical report by Official Languages Commissioner Graham Fraser, who accused the
Harper government of having “directly undermined” the official languages plan with budget
cuts and by eliminating the Court Challenges program, which financed minority-rights court
cases against the government.
Citizenship and Immigration recently set targets through 2011 to attract between 8,000 and
10,000 French-speaking immigrants a year to francophone communities outside of Quebec.
Driving these targets are demographic data showing that for every new immigrant whose
mother tongue is French, there are 10 whose mother tongue is English, and that the vast
majority of newcomers adopt English upon arrival in Canada.
Meanwhile, the debate over immigration and language continues in Quebec, where the
Bouchard-Taylor commission on reasonable accommodation of minorities heard last week
from a prominent Parti Qu&#233;b&#233;cois strategist that only an independent Quebec could protect

the French language. The commission also heard from French-speaking immigrants to
Quebec who said their lack of English was impeding their ability to get jobs.
And in October, PQ Leader Pauline Marois caused a small furor when she proposed the
Quebec Identity Act, which would require all new immigrants to the province to learn French
within three years. Those who failed a language test would not be permitted to hold public
office, raise money for a political party or petition the National Assembly. The bill was
widely condemned.
The Official Languages Act, first passed in 1969 and updated twice since, stipulates
Canadians' right to receive federal government services in either English or French where
numbers warrant, the right of public servants to work in either language in certain areas, the
right of either English or French speakers to advance in the public service, and that the
government must promote bilingualism.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20071204.wcensusmain1204/BNStory/census2006/home?cid=al_gam_mostview