government | Kerrzone Musings

Yesterday the Quebec national assembly unamiously passed a resolution to request merchants no longer use the currently common greeting “bonjour/hi” but rather replace it with just bonjour.

French is after all the official language of la belle province, and including English in the greeting is annoying, apparently.

A one sided approach

Of course the required greeting for all federal agencies “bonjour/hello” is okay, Canada the nation is bilingual so this greeting is common sense but it is in fact mandated by the agencies.

Almost all my siblings work for the federal government and they have told me it is a serious offence for any employee to not open the conversation in both official languages.

If the government representative is prompted to continue in a language they do not speak (not all federal employees are bilingual, although many are) they must immediately seek support of a colleague that does speak the language the citizen prefers (English or French)

Contravening this requirement is considered a serious performance infraction and if discovered becomes part of your permanent performance record and if repeated can lead to dire concequences.

Is Quebecs appraoch this really important?

The national assembly is really reinforcing the symbolic importance of language to the culture. For bilingual Canada reinforcing the multilingual culture is a critical statement for our country.

All provinces come under this bilingual umbrella and although Quebec considers itself unique I find this trivial waste of time on language trivialities insulting to the rest of Canada.

Imagine the furor in Quebec if another province requested their merchants to never greet a customer with bonjour.

Ah the insanity of it all, can’t we just be friends?

What is the optimal level of government involement in our lives? Consider a jurisdiction where individuals lived as and how they like. Ideally laws would not be needed provided individual behaviours were self governed not to negatively impact others. The government could focus on common infrastructure everyone used, roads, power, water etc.

In this ideal state (which is probably as practical as communisum) lawyers and courts would not be needed as everyone would self govern and conflicts resolved through consensus.

Moving to the other side of the balance beam a central authority (i.e., government) would manage both infrastructure and social interraction. This would extend not only to behaviour laws but also intervention in commerce (the economy).

My utopian situation is somewhat like that described by Any Rand in her novel Atlas Shrugged. The opposite exaggeration described here is alarmingly close to the current state of governance in Canada.

Focus on the Few

As Canada appoaches a federal election I am singularly dissapointed at the focus by all contenders on small constituencies as opposed to the population as a whole. As the promises become more targeted to specific groups both the complexity and cost rise.

While it may seem positive to the few that benefit, for the country as a whole this is a detrimental approach.

This brings me back to the basic premise of this post, too much involvement by governments in day to day behaviours ultimately will lead to bad results.

In Canada, it is time to swing the control and involvement pendulum the other way.

Kerrzone Musings

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