Chris Selley: Can Quebec’s language vultures not leave hospitals alone, at least?

The Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) government continues to deliberately deplete its province’s reserves of goodwill between linguistic communities. Under Bill 96, the CAQ’s crackdown on people who don’t speak French always and fluently, recent targets of Quebec’s “francisation” goons have included a 65-year-old Montreal hospital that serves some of the city’s Italian-Canadian community. It has 472 beds, 103 of which are long-term-care beds, according to the city’s website, and it has long been designated an officially bilingual facility. Its official name is Hôpital Santa Cabrini Ospedale, in recognition of that status.

It’s not quite clear what Bill 96 has done to that status, but it seems to be something meaningful. In preparation for the goons’ visit last week, the Montreal Gazette reports, the hospital instructed staff always to speak French first to patients.

You shouldn’t even need any such policy for random patients who wander in the door: In almost any Montreal neighbourhood, French is the best guess at a lingua franca.

But if patients are known to the hospital, and known to prefer speaking Italian, then it’s simply cruel. And cruel is what Bill 96 was first and foremost designed to be, although most Laurentian Elites still struggle to admit that to themselves, let alone publicly.

Imagine your nonna’s doctor, with whom she has always communicated in Italian, suddenly greeting her in French and asking her whether she requires linguistic accommodation. Or your zaidie for that matter, who has always communicated at the hospital in English. These rules apparently now apply at other designated-bilingual health-care institutions as well, including Montreal’s Jewish General.

For a confused older person, a single misunderstanding or stressor can send an already tense day straight down the tubes, out the door and into a cab. Even just reading about this in the news might understandably discombobulate many senior citizens.

That’s where my mind went first. But the Gazette’s sources at Santa-Cabrini objected on other very legitimate grounds: The absurdity of adding useless procedures to a woefully overtaxed health-care system; the disrespect shown to a proud community, roughly 150 years established in Montreal, and which gives quite generously to the hospital in question. (Santa-Cabrini’s charitable foundation issued receipts for nearly $900,000 in donations last year.)

Last year the Quebec Office of the French Language (OQLF) paid francisation goons to visit Jewish General and (ahem) suggest that historical donors’ plaques be translated into French from English and Yiddish. That’s absolutely insane. No other jurisdiction I’m aware of in the world does anything like that, unless it’s part of some overtly discriminatory agenda. Every nickel of that exercise was empirically wasted.

“Focus on health care, on hiring nurses, not on hiring language inspectors. This is ridiculous. That’s the message that we want to get out,” Mario Napolitano, who organized an Italian-Quebecer protest against the OQLF inspections, told the Gazette.

That’s fair enough, but it almost implies there are competing priorities here to be balanced. There aren’t.

Everything the government is demanding of Santa-Cabrini and Jewish General is worse than useless. It is taxpayer money spent in the name of corroding social harmony. (The only saving grace, as I know Montreal, is that the effort is futile.)

Even if you believe in strict restrictions on minority-language rights in Quebec, which I do not, you cannot usefully reinforce French as the dominant language of public life in Quebec in a hospital emergency room or long-term care facility, where people are coping with the worst moments of their lives. You can only dismay them by not trying compassionately to meet them where they are, linguistically (I suspect that compassion is happening, despite government edicts).

And as the OQLF demonstrated in a recent study that the language hawks immediately shredded, burned and flushed the ashes of down the toilet, French isn’t imperilled in Quebec to begin with. This is all just a majoritarian adventure to crack down on people who didn’t grow up speaking French, largely in retribution for them not having voted for sovereignty 30 years ago.

In other bilingualism news, journalist Dean Beeby reports that federal official languages commissioner Raymond Théberge has launched an investigation into the CBC proactively posting online its responses to journalists’ access-to-information requests.

That’s an undisputed best practice in the world of access-to-information, a field in which Canada (and the CBC in particular) ranks somewhere below South Sudan and Myanmar: If you’ve released information to one journalist, there’s no earthly reason to make other journalists request it again and go through the whole rigmarole. Just send them a link to the response, or they can find it themselves.

But federal government institutions are required to publish everything in French and English; the CBC’s responses are in English. So now we have a federal appointee considering whether this rare attempt at transparency must be published in both official languages.

That would amount to thousands upon thousands of pages of documents. They absolutely will not be translated. The only practical outcome is not to publish the documents at all. I’m quite sure CBC would be happy with that.

And without getting too melodramatic about it — official bilingualism is totally sustainable, in a rational form — I feel like we’re at a crossroads here. There was a time when Canada was fat and happy enough that doing arguably weird and excessive things in the name of official bilingualism didn’t seem like too much of a burden or a hassle. We had plenty of money, debt-to-GDP was fine, pretty much everyone with a decent job had a decent place to live.

That time is not now. This is a broke and broken country, requiring generations of punishingly expensive fixing — not least on the most basic issue of housing — that actually made a controversy out of children’s medicine delivered to Quebec, during a children’s medicine shortage, on grounds the labels weren’t bilingual.

It’s enough, already. Someone just has to say it: “enough.” But no one with the power to change anything ever, ever will.

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