Official Bilingualism Not Appreciated!

Hat tip to Neale News for this one. It comes from my morning Globe & Mail, which I have yet to read in paper format.

OTTAWA (by Bruce Cheadle of the Canadian Press) -- The good news: official bilingualism poses no particular impediment to visible minorities in the federal public service. The bad news: many anglophone and immigrant public servants hate it.

A series of focus groups, designed to explore whether official languages policy poses career barriers for minority groups, turned up some uncomfortable perceptions about what is supposed to be a motherhood issue for federal employees.

"We can clearly assert that official languages policies remain imperfectly understood and far from widely endorsed," says a report prepared for the Public Service Human Resources Management Agency. "This negativity is directly responsible for what we observed in terms of active resistance and hostility towards the actual, systemic barriers that the official languages policies do impose."

Well, no ... actually they do understand the policy perfectly and also understand the manner of its implementation has very negative consequences on them and their careers. The "negativity and hostility" results from that reality.