Machjo

Right. even our police and CBSA officers and even Minister's counsels who work in English are working in broken English. Where are we going to find these competent English speakers?

Like the right to be discriminated against in the separate-school system? Why should I respect a Charter that violates the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (a superior document in my estimation)? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waldman_v._Canada

Correct me if I'm wrong here, but I thought that rather than ignoring the Charter of Rights, Ford was in fact applying it. Remember the Notwithstanding clause appears in the Charter itself.

Er... the Notwithstanding clause is inscribed in the Constitution. Are you saying that the Constitution violates itself?

Given how Ford has used the NWC to shrink City Council, it would now be extremely difficult for him to argue against using it to eliminate the separate-school system that violates the International covenant on civil and Political Rights.

You might be correct that all of these years of decentralization might have weakened the sovereignty movement.

Given the cost of official bilingualism, should Canada negotiate an amicable separation from Quebec? For example, we might negotiate a common bi-national citizenship; but other than that, both would operate as sovereign states.

Standard or broken English? If standard, then few government officials will know any other language. How would an arresting officer, a police officer, or a judge communicate with a suspect from Quebec or Nunavut for example? If Broken English, then how do we ensure precise communication?

Maybe we could start sticking pencils in people's hair to measure its curliness and measure people's nose-bridges too eh?

The Charter even defeats the purpose of a Charter. A Bill of Rights in a Constitution generally aims to protect the minority from the tyranny of the majority. The Canadian charter of Rights and Freedoms does precisely the opposite. It entrenches the privileges of the two dominant ethnic communities through its language and separate-school provisions. In terms of protecting minority rights, that's even worse than having no Charter at all.

And the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms violates the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waldman_v._Canada

An Esperanto-speaking friend of mine was trying to get an opinion piece (of which I'm pasting the English version below) published in different English and French publications. They all seem to have turned him down. He decided to share it with me to see what I thought of it, and I found it shocking. Though I see why some would disagree with his recommendations and conclusions, I would have thought that they might have wanted to publish it just because of the stats it presented. While one could disagree with his recommendations, one would think they'd at least agree with his conclusion that official bilingualism is a fundamentally broken system. I present the article with his permission below: Why the linguistic rights of Canada’s indigenous peoples must include the obligation to an IAL The Assembly of First Nations has long called on Ottawa to make Canada’s indigenous languages co-official with English and French.[1] Based on my experience with official bilingualism, I don’t see how Parliament could do that without the adoption of an international auxiliary language (IAL) at least in public-school second-language instruction as multilingual states like Indonesia and Tanzania have done. The following might illustrate my point more clearly. A few years ago, members of the Ottawa Police Service arrested my wife for working in Canada without the proper authorization to do so and then transferred her to the local Ottawa CBSA office. A CBSA officer interviewed my wife, had her detained, and then referred her to the IRB. At her bond hearing, my wife conclusively proved the falsity of the CBSA officer’s interview notes claiming that she didn’t know my name, where I lived, any local tourist area, and other knowledge, which prompted the judge to grant her bond. Around a week after her release, I read the police and CBSA reports. The police reports revealed a plethora of orthographic and grammatical errors and, as I continued to analyze them, possible basic lexical errors. The CBSA officer’s report revealed even more broken English to the point that I struggled to understand parts of it. My wife later got her hearing. Since the police and CBSA reports had already been printed in what some might call English and my wife’s counsel didn’t know French, the hearing proceeded in what was supposed to be English. The judge ruled in my wife’s favour in part because he correctly concluded that a reasonable person could understand the reports only vaguely without further precision from their authors (whom the Minister’s counsel refused to present for questioning), but only after the state had already spent probably tens of thousands of dollars all because a CBSA officer decided to interview my wife in an official language the officer herself didn’t know. About a week after the Minister appealed the decision, I received the hearing transcript. Since I’d not been allowed inside the hearing room until after the judge had decided to render his decision, I was about to read the transcript for the first time. The transcript revealed that the Minister’s counsel so struggled to understand parts of my wife’s affidavit printed in Standard English that the judge had to correct her a few times throughout the hearing. In hindsight, the above shouldn’t have surprised me. As a multilingual former expatriate French-Canadian with an interest in languages and language policy, I already knew long before my wife’s arrest that around half of Canadian adults possesses functional literacy in neither official language,[2] that core French and French immersion courses in New Brunswick give success rates of around one and ten percent respectively,[3] that Ontario and Quebec public schools struggle to find enough qualified second-language teachers to fill the demand,[4][5] that the Government of Canada must compete fiercely with the private sector for the few competent official-language speakers that the market can supply, and (contrary to popular belief) success rates in Europe are not much better when one reads the data.[6] I also already knew that English orthography is around three times more difficult to learn than those of Finnish, German, and Greek[7] and that 150 hours of Esperanto suffice to reach a level that requires at least 1500 of English.[8] I can’t imagine that I’m the only multi-literate (as opposed to merely officially bilingual) resident of Canada who has faced a language barrier before the Government of Canada in its own official languages. In fact, even our own Members of Parliament depend on professional interpreters like UN ambassadors do to communicate with their colleagues and compatriots. How would Canada translate our laws, require businesses to package and label products, and provide other services in over fifty languages when our Members of Parliament themselves can’t learn the two we have now? Add to that the gross inadequacy of the British adversarial system (compared to the inquisitorial one) when the participants must communicate in a second language or through an interpreter! With the above in mind, I don’t see how indigenous peoples will convince their sympathizers to further increase the number of official languages in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, without first expanding our understanding of indigenous language rights to include not only the right to the mother language, but the obligation to an international auxiliary language [whether Esperanto, Chinuk Wawa (in its present or a revised form), or some other easy-to-learn language for practical intra- and international communication] too. Given how few Canadians successfully learn our present official languages well, many might welcome this new obligation for the sake of reconciliation and a complete knowledge of a common second language for all Canadians. [1] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/afn-asks-ottawa-to-declare-all-aboriginal-languages-official/article25378218/ [2] http://www.conferenceboard.ca/hcp/provincial/education/adlt-lowlit.aspx [3] https://docplayer.net/41454060-Lessons-in-learning-parlez-vous-francais-the-advantages-of-bilingualism-in-canada.html [4] http://publications.gc.ca/collections/collection_2014/parl/xc60-1/XC60-1-1-412-1-eng.pdf [5] https://www.cse.gouv.qc.ca/fichiers/documents/publications/Avis/50-0485.pdf [6] https://www.unige.ch/fti/elf/files/9614/5865/9202/elfwp14.pdf [7] http://www.oecd.org/education/ceri/35562310.pdf [8] http://www.ladocumentationfrancaise.fr/var/storage/rapports-publics/054000678.pdf

What would be your thoughts on the following petition? Petition to the House of Commons in Parliament assembled Whereas: · Official bilingualism doubles the number of languages that a speaker of an indigenous or other unofficial sign, oral, or written language must learn to access employment in the Government of Canada; We, the undersigned, residents of Canada, call upon the House of Commons in Parliament Assembled to revise, in consultation with the provincial parliaments, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms so as to adopt a policy of local official unilingualism in the local official language.

I don't mind no majority party as long as we end up with a majority coalition. A minority government remains too unstable.

It's not your opinion, it's historical fact. Countries increasingly closed their borders off to immigration as the welfare state grew. Racial laws aside, even Canada was far more open-bordered prior to WWI than it is today. Coincidence?

Also, a conditional entry system is not as cruel as some might think. For example, Jose gets an online job offer to come and work in Canada. He works in Canada for a year but then his hours start to decline. Feeling the pinch and thinking he can live better back in Mexico, he returns to Mexico to work. He later gets another good offer in Canada. He returns and maybe gets a better job this time. Again, after a year, his hours decline and he returns to Mexico to work. Finally the third time, he gets a well-paid management job, lives well, and can finally support himself in Canada for five years straight. Nothing would stop him from returning to try his luck again until he can make it. Nothing cruel about it. That's life for anyone. Same with a Canadian who wants to move to another province. Why should it be any different for a foreigner wanting to find work in Canada?

I'm for more open borders at least in principle, but unlike some open-border advocates, I'm under no illusion of how we must reform our welfare system to make it happen if we choose to go down that road.

I think they need to understand the distinction between immigration and social assistance. I'm all for open borders, but not for open wallets. As Milton Friedman put it, you can't have open borders and an overly-generous welfare state at the same time. It has to be one or the other. Hong Kong and Singapore appear to have understood this. In many respects, they are more welcoming of immigrants than Canada is on a per-capita basis; but the reason immigrants integrate so much better there is because immigrants to those countries don't enjoy as easy access to social assistance. In fact, the reason Canada is less welcoming of immigrants than Hong Kong and Singapore are is precisely because our welfare system makes it unsustainable. Proponents of open borders need to understand that they have to choose, it has to be one or the other, and that they can't have it both ways. In fact, aside from racial laws like the Chinese Exclusion Act, Canad, the US, and many other states had far more open borders up until WWI than they do today. So why not now? simple: they didn't have the welfare state we have now either. History, Hong, Kong, and Singapore bear Milton Friedman's claims out again and again. Perhaps we need a national conversation on this: do we want to be more open-bordered like Hong Kong (in which case we will need to curb our welfare state to basic bread-and-butter issues) or do we want to maintain our overly-generous welfare state (in which case we will need to close our borders at least somewhat). That's not racist, that's just economic reality.

There actually is some truth to that. For example, if a highway between downtown and a suburb experiences constant gridlock, that might encourage more people to move downtown and more businesses to move to the suburb to circumvent it. Some might even turn to tele-commuting. If you build another highway, it might reduce gridlock in the short term but will also encourage more people to move to the suburbs and reduce the incentive for businesses to move there too. As a result, the suburb grows and the gridlock returns. It's a question of whether we're looking for a short-term or long-term solution. Strangely, I found communiting in Hong Kong of all palces more convenient than anywhere else I've been to on my travels. I think the reason is that its city planner encourage small CBds stattered throughout the city with one within reasonable walking distance of anywhere.

And on the matter of birth rates, increased immigration could actually increase Canadian birth rates. Many Canadians reside abroad, might marry abroad, have children abroad, but decide whether to return to Canada based on how easily they could bring their family to Canada. Also, population growth creates jobs which in turn could give people more confidence to have more children. People have fewer children in recession.

Nothing would stop Canada from allowing a person to visit, study, work, or do business in Canada visa free but then agree to confer permanent residency or citizenship on him only after 5 years of primary residency in Canada for example. This would mean that unless he can make it on his own for the first five years, he'll soon have to return home. That would help to filter them out.

A work visa does not grant a person the right to any social assistance beyond a free ticket back home. I dislike our present Charter; yet even under out present Charter, it would be easy for Canada to allow a person to visit, study, work, or do business in Canada visa-free without conferring citizenship or even permanent residency on him. As long as we don't give him citizenship or permanent residency, then he would enjoy only the right to work and nothing else.

Generous government programs attract the wrong kind of immigrant. Singapore accepts more immigrants per capita than Canada does yet it's doing just fine. Bear in mind though that Singapore expects them to support themselves and so it attracts a very different, entrepreneurial kind of immigrant. The problem isn't with immigration per se, but the social assistance we give immigrants.

Bernier already said he's not opposed to immigration per say. He seems to oppose just the money being spent on promoting it. I think he has a more libertarian let-them-in-but-let-them-support-themselves approach, which is more or less where I stand too.

Have you read the Conservative Party of Quebec's platform? It even supports a Swedish-style school-voucher program and the freedom of any English-speaking parent to send their child to school in English. It also favours allowing any shop to put up a sign in any language in the same size as French. By Quebec standards, that's quite libertarian-leaning.