Last Updated on: 12th July 2013, 03:24 pm
Yeah yeah yeah, we already know Stephen Harper is scary and not who I’d vote for that’s for sure. But I saw him do something that I found to be completely patronizing! There is no other word to describe what I saw.
Stephen Harper’s up there, spouting off about his feelings about the liberals. Same old same old. But occasionally, after going through a huge diatribe about how his government will stand up for Canadians in English, he’d sprinkle in a little french. Usually, it was a couple of words, and if you were super lucky, you got a whole sentence! What a god damn fucking gift! The guy who’s going to lead the country can only afford to stop and say an occasional sentence in French? And this is a good campaign strategy? Who should I strangle first, Stephen Harper, or his little speech-writing weasels? Let me add that these occasional sprinklings in French were spoken so poorly that I thought maybe a male version of my mother, who thought Gothier was pronounced goth-yer, (I’m sorry mom), was up there.
Ok, if you’re not going to make a concerted effort to speak our second *official* language, don’t even fucking try. I mean, he wasn’t even in Quebec for Christ’s sake. He was in Nova Scotia. Was he trying to somehow earn brownie points with the people of Nova Scotia because he could say Bonjour? Was he just trying to shut up the critics who noticed his complete lack of French last time around? Doing what he did was like throwing bread crumbs to a starving homeless guy. It’s patronizing and it shows exactly how little French he actually knows.
I think the translator that was there to convert any french back to English was shocked to have to do some work at one point, and I only saw one such two-sentence translation in the whole damn pile of shit known as a speech. Ooo I guess I should say that if you’d won the lottery, you’d get two whole sentences. And let me say that they were nothing like the giant mound of English he’d been spewing.
This really pisses me off because I saw this a million times when I spent a bit of time in Quebec. The voicemail greetings you’d get that were supposed to be bilingual technically were, if you wanted to be an ass about it, but the English message was nowhere near as detailed as the French equivalent. The French would say something about “you have reached insert name here. I am out of my office Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, but leave me a message and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.” And the English? “Hi. Leave a message after the beep.” Tell me that’s not horribly inaccurate. I’m just lucky I can speak French.
So now, whenever I see this, it sticks out like a sore thumb. Does he actually think this is going to win him favour? Think again, Mr. Harper.