I read an article this morning about how apparently some French people are upset at the new Starbucks because their menu is almost entirely in English. You can find the original article here. The article goes on to say that the Green party is suggesting the government should step in and force bilingual signage in our city because we are supposed to be “bilingual”. I read these kinds of statements and honestly, it makes my blood boil in anger.
This entire thing happened awhile ago in Dieppe. Now there are literally language police who’s responsibility is to make sure signs are done right so that French is first and English is second. If you don’t have a sign done the correct way, you’re fined $140 in violation of the bylaw. Dieppe is primarily French so if they want to promote that identity, I get it. I may not like it or agree with it, but I get it.
Now a political party is suggesting that signage and menus and whatever other things in private businesses should be in both official languages. Is this really what the government wants to spend their time on? With a mass exodus of people leaving here, crappy health care with long lines and major job losses, unemployment higher than it’s been in a long time, and countless other issues, THIS is what the government wants to work on? Are you f*cking kidding me?
When Dieppe made this proposal before, I started thinking about the consequences of multi-language signs, menus, ads, and other types of print media. If this same sort of thing were to happen in Moncton, let’s take a look at some of the other cultures who choose to live here and do so just fine.
Imagine for a moment that you have a man who was born and raised in South Korea. There he’s spent a good portion of his life preparing and serving food to his locals in his own Korean restaurant for years. He then decides after living there for long enough to move his entire family to Canada, specifically to Moncton. Now, the only thing he’s known how to do for most of his life is make Korean food. So he decides to open up an authentic Korean restaurant in Moncton. Now, he is fluent in his native tongue, but speaks very poor English but he manages to get by. In wanting to keep his restaurant authentic, he puts all the signs and menus in Korean with English on the menus for the locals to understand.
Now, he knows that most of the people in Moncton do not understand Korean, but that there are Korean locals who do. He also wants to preserve the authenticity of his restaurant by doing as much as he can in his own native language. His staff is comprised of mostly his family. When you see this restaurant on the street, it looks very nice and very authentic because he’s replicated what he had back home to the exact detail.
Then the government steps in and says, well, you’re in a bilingual province which means all of your menus and signs need to have French in them. First of all, no one in his family understands French at all. Secondly, and this is the one that bugs me the most, by placing French on the menus and signs, it implies that people can be served in French at the restaurant. No one there will know how to speak it, but people will think they can because the signs are in French.
All this guy wants to do is have his authentic restaurant for people to enjoy, but because the government is stepping in and telling him how to write his menus and put up his signs, he cannot afford to make the changes, or hire bilingual staff, so he goes out of business, collects welfare/unemployment, and becomes another statistic to add to our mass unemployment problem.
This is a simple example of how a business owner should be able to decide for themselves how they want to conduct business. If that person knows that they may be excluding a certain portion of the population because of the way their menus are made, or signs are displayed, then that is at the discretion of the owner, not the government. What’s next, telling the same guy that he has to put fried chicken or steak on the menu because his food items aren’t appealing to everyone? It’s like the lady who complained about the fact that McDonald’s didn’t have enough “healthy” food items. Uhm, hello? If you want healthy food, GO SOMEWHERE ELSE!!!
At the end of the day, if you don’t like what you see in a business, or don’t agree with their practices, THEN DON’T GO THERE! How is that a problem? You walk into a Korean restaurant and no one speaks French so you’re going to throw a fit at them? You walk into a Starbucks and there’s no French but it’s in the middle of a city which is primarily English and somehow you’re shocked? This exact same thing happened when the Casino opened. There wasn’t enough French staff so certain French people threw a fit about it.
When I am in Dieppe, I expect that most things will be in French because Dieppe is primarily a French city. I know that and expect that. I don’t like it because I don’t understand French, but I respect the fact that they have chosen to make their majority their highest priority. It’s the exact same way in many other cities around the world. I can be in the middle of Mexico where everything is in Spanish with a little English here and there. I need to accept the conditions of where I am. In doing so, it leaves me feeling a bit excluded, which is I’m sure what the French customer at Starbucks felt. The difference is that they were in Moncton, not Dieppe, and Moncotn’s primary language is English, not French.
I believe that if you own a business, you should have the right to operate and execute that business in whatever language you choose. It is not for the government to decide how you should print your signs, your menus, your advertisements. It should be up to the business owner.
Seriously folks, the government needs to stay the hell out of private businesses and let us run them, legally, the way we want.
