Illegal pasta is on many menus and we should all be concerned. I like to live dangerously in Quebec: I like my pasta al dente. As we found out this week it’s not really something that is supposed to be written on a menu in ristorantes in Quebec. The folks over at Buonanotte were horrified to find they were under investigation for daring to put some Italian on their menu. My guess is most right-thinking people won’t get their noodles in a knot over this. But it’s a very different matter for a bureaucrat working for the language cops, a bureaucrat with obviously far too much time on his hands. The language office kind of reminds of that old Monty Python skit: The Ministry of Silly Walks. The Ministry is the place where government employees basically are paid to walk silly and to award grants to citizens who can come up with, well, new silly walks. Does that remind you of anything? Like perhaps our language office? If they want to make Quebec the laughingstock of the world, they are doing a pretty good job. What’s next on the list for these people? English muffins, souvlakis, shish-taouk, fish and chips? (Actually, fish and chips has already been deemed illegal.) Will they even target that sacred symbol of fast food in Quebec, the exalted “hot dog.” I think even ordering “deux steamés” would be heresy in their eyes. It’s quite clear that the government and the language zealots are in denial, denial that Montreal is a bilingual city. We – Anglophones -- are treated worse than children sometimes. Non-francophone taxpayers should be neither seen nor heard, just keep the tax money coming in, The OQLF just gets dumber and dumber and perhaps we should just laugh it off, but the subtext is not amusing. You see under Bill 14, language inspectors will be given more power, extraordinary powers to search and seize. More power to hunt down anything English. Anglos have become sport. They love squeezing us until we cry uncle, attacking door signs posted by businesses in NDG to bike shops in the Plateau that dare to post English signs. Is that the kind of society we truly want to live in? A society where everything is seen through the optics of language and the perceived threat to French purity. There is much to fear with the PQ’s new legislation. It is designed not so much to bolster French but to once again diminish us. Give me the Ministry of Silly Walks any time. Truly it is funnier.
