In Montreal, a Berlin Wall of the Mind?
Xavier Dolan, at 28, one of Quebec’s — and Canada’s — most celebrated film directors, recalled
that when his parents lived in the predominantly Anglophone neighborhood of NDG in the 1980s, his mother couldn’t wait to leave because she was taunted by Anglophones telling her to "speak white," a slur used to denigrate those speaking other languages in public.
" he said. that Today the French speak English and the English speak French, and that didn’t exist when you had the two solitudes,
The stop signs in my neighborhood were routinely vandalized to say "Arrête 101," or Stop 101, a reference to Bill 101, a 1977 law
that made French the official language of government and courts in Quebec, and requires that French lettering be twice as big as English on public signs and that immigrants send their children to French-only schools.
And the city — with its Anglophone minority and Francophone majority surrounded by an
Anglophone majority in the rest of the country — itself remains somewhat bifurcated.
Heather said that It is taboo to talk about the two solitudes, because we are supposed to pretend
that we all get along when we are, in many ways, still separate,
By DAN BILEFSKYMARCH 5, 2018
MONTREAL — On one side of a grand square near the old Port of Montreal is a sculpture of a Frenchwoman in a Chanel suit, clasping a poodle
and sneering at the The Bank of Montreal, a former symbol of British colonial rule built in 1847.
But he also cautioned that language laws were still necessary to protect French language
and culture in Quebec because globalization and the internet are eroding the language.
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