[Acajack]

Originally Posted by MTL-514

I would tend to agree with most of what you wrote, Acajack, and have to admit that I don’t know much about the situation in Quebec City back then, or about that in Hull/Gatineau/Aylmer (although I became quite familiar with that region when I lived there, and in downtown Ottawa, from 1993 thru 2000).

Where my position might diverge somewhat from yours (but maybe not), having read your take on language issues in Montreal, over a number of years, is the following: while Bill 101 has certain merit in that there was inarguably an imbalance to be corrected, it’s extremely unfortunate that the people/party who brought in in were also those who were threatening to rip Montreal (largely against its will) along with the rest of the province of Quebec, out of Canada, and that in their radicalism and overzealousness, chose to bring in legislation not requiring bilingualism but banning it, and imposing an entirely fictional and unjust unilingual French face on what was at the time still Canada’s largest and most important city, and a city that, demographically was anything but French-only. This exacerbated and prolonged Montreal’s and Quebec’s linguistic divide and caused irreparable damage to Montreal’s (and even more so the Rest of Quebec’s) historical second language communities and institutions, that we are still struggling to bounce back from, or at least contain, in 2020. Not to mention decades of economic and demographic damage and stagnation it caused Quebec and particularly Montreal (which, thankfully, we finally seem to have now reversed and put behind us in the past decade or so - hopefully permanently).

You've been reading my posts on this stuff for years?

More to the point, I can understand why some Anglo-Montrealers felt the measures were mean-spirited. I mean, those weren't generous times in terms of attitudes about such things.