Canadians for Language Fairness’s response

Thank you to all those who have signed this petition - this is a good start to a request that is designed to increase our distribution list so that we can reach people who don't normally hear from us. Canadians for Language Fairness started as a non-profit organization to oppose the City of Ottawa's bylaw 2001-170. This by-law was described by the-then Mayor Bob Chiarelli as "Practical Bilingualism". This policy has given the French-speakers a lot of service in French and has given the 14-15% French-speakers at least 30% of employment at the city. To the French-speaking elites, this is not good enough - they want more. They want to be able to force the City to translate every document that is currently in English to French and this can only be done at an exorbitant cost. Recently, our city's budget was published only in English and this made the French activists demand that this had to be translated into French (that's 300,000 words at a cost of 75 cents - $1.00 per word). Can you imagine the cost of having ALL documents translated?

At this point, the current Mayor Jim Watson & the City Council said, "NO". Now every French activist group is getting organized to force the City to be declared "Officially Bilingual" which would leave the council NO choice.

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