PEGGY CURRAN
The Gazette

Clearly, we are dealing with crazy people here. Not flaky, wrestle-with-your-half-sister-on-Jerry-Springer crazy people, but dangerous, out-of-control, OLF crazy people. Scary, evangelical bureaucrats, only no one in power has the courage to call for a straitjacket. After all, they're just following orders.

In case you missed it, the Office de la Langue Francaise has told a small hospital in the Eastern Townships, Brome-Missisquoi-Perkins, or BMP, that it is breaking the law by continuing to post bilingual signs.

Descendants of anglophone Loyalists built and paid for the hospital when it was founded at the turn of the century. For generations, they've gone there to have babies and gone there to die.

Money from their donations is still good, naturally, but the OLF has told the hospital that as of May 15 their language is no longer welcome on the walls. BMP doesn't have enough English-speaking clients to qualify as a bilingual institution, so forbidden words like "emergency," "radiology," and "main entrance" must go. The law is the law and must be obeyed, even when the law is an idiot.

It's hardly the first time OLF inspectors, led to the bait by anonymous snoops, have taken a cleaver to signs that offend the sensibilities of a handful of fanatics, words that could leave the erroneous impression that Shakespeare himself would be welcome in the wards of health-care facilities outside downtown Montreal.

Last year's offender was the Centre Universitaire de Sante de L'Estrie, which had posted a few English signs after another local hospital was closed. It was a measure of courtesy, but also of comfort - hospital patients are so often vulnerable, stressed and old.

Alas, ideology is not built on small kindnesses, or what works best for the community, in this case a region famous for co-operation between English and French-speaking farmers spanning 200 years. Nor, as francophone pharmacists learned earlier this month, is it built on what people seem to want.

Listen to what OLF official Marie-Christine Detuncq said when she was asked why bilingual signs are outlawed in rural hospitals like BMP but allowed in department stores.

"It's because a hospital is a government agency, while a store is a private business."

It's because the hospital is paid for with your tax dollars, which we're spending to hire weasels to track down every pathetic infraction of the language law. It's because government-operated hospitals, desperate for funding in a cash-strapped health-care system, aren't about to rock the boat. It's because hospitals, unlike money-making enterprises like department stores or casinos, don't cater to tourists, who might see the ban on languages other than French as downright paranoid and say so on 60 Minutes.

The people who run Brome-Missisquoi-Perkins say they don't want to make a fuss. It's not the Townshippers' way to turn this into a political incident. And they certainly don't want Jean Charest, the Liberal-leader-in-waiting, to have to worry about it. But if Charest isn't supposed to care, and the hospital is ready to grumble and give in, how do you rate the chances that the government will finally rethink what the language law is supposed to do and pull the plug on the language cops?

Banning a few bilingual signs in an 88-bed hospital in Cowansville does not constitute legitimate, necessary protection of the French language awash in an English sea. It is petty, mean-spirited, small-minded niggling that will do nothing to advance the cause of French.

When the OLF decides a hospital or a town or a social-service agency no longer has enough English clients to qualify for bilingual status, do you suppose anyone ever stops to wonder why that is, what prompted so many anglophones - especially university-educated professionals - to pitch their tents somewhere else? Could it be that they got the feeling they weren't wanted?

©1998 The Gazette,
a division of Southam Inc.


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