Jean-François Lisée is Our Worst Nightmare

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I much prefer enemies that are open and forthright about their enmity towards our community and though it seems counter-intuitive, French language radicals like Mario Beaulieu are preferable to snake-charmers like Jean-François Lisée who feign interest and sympathy and espouse cooperation, all the while harbouring the same nefarious attitudes towards us as Mr. Beaulieu and his ilk.

While Mr. Beaulieu is crude and visceral, Mr Lisée is calm and seemingly reasonable, which makes him all the more dangerous.

Jean-François Lisée is every bit as determined to advance the cause of the French language on our backs, his smooth-talking spiel nothing more than a clever device to camouflage his true intent.
I am reminded of the wonderful scene in The Exorcist, a story of a girl whose body and mind is possessed by the devil.
An elderly priest is called to perform a exorcism and when he arrives the young attending priest describes what the devil has been up to.

Father Merrin, (played by the inimitable Max von Sydow,) the experienced exorcist, lays down some ground rules for the younger and less experienced Father Karras to follow, telling him that it is;

 "Especially important is the warning to avoid conversations with the demon. We may ask what is relevant but anything beyond that is dangerous. He is a liar. The demon is a liar. He will lie to confuse us. But he will also mix lies with the truth to attack us. The attack is psychological, Damien, and powerful. So don't listen to him. Remember that - do not listen!"  Watch the scene

Jean-François Lisée, the Minister responsible for anglophones, the very title so grossly offensive, that it makes my blood boil.
And so it seems we are to be treated as exotic animals, needing 'special' handling as by a zookeeper, all because we are not 'true' Quebecers.

In choosing the talented Mr. Lisée, the PQ adopted a clever strategy, one where they feign interest and concern, but in truth are running nothing more than a cruel and cynical game of rope-a-dope, and unfortunately, there are plenty of dopes in our community that have fallen for his ruse.

And so he comes a courting, visiting our English school boards to 'discuss' the linguistic situation with officials, who fall over themselves, giddy with excitement to explain to a 'sympathetic' Peequist, the tribulations of falling enrolment. Link
What a colossal humiliation and waste of time and an utterly pitiful scene to endure!
It is nothing more than a sad spectacle of the absurd, a cruel pantomime played out with anglophones as the butt of a separatist joke!
Mr. Lisée toys with us like a kindergarten teacher pretending to take her charges seriously in a game of Ring-Around-the-Rosy

Rather than engage him in 'pseudo' negotiations, which are really nothing more than exercises in bad faith, we should heed the old adage, which tells us to be Beware of Greeks bearing gifts

Wake Up!!!  
A cursory examination of Mr. Lisée's record would have a thinking person surmise that he isn't there to help us at all, rather the opposite and as they say, "A leopard doesn't change its spots."

Read this story by Don MacPherson and honestly tell me that engaging this paranoid Anglophobe is really in our best interest.

“We refuse to be the generation that will see Montreal marginalize French! We shall not accept that francophones soon are in the minority on the island and we shall not let French lose its critical mass in Quebec’s metropolis.”
Does that read as anglo-friendly to you? Read:Lisée building bridges? Is this a joke?

Here's one of my favourite examples of how faulty assumptions lead to faulty conclusions;

In an article written in the Montreal Gazette, Lisée told us that;

“CEGEP is important for linguistic transfer. It is the time when young people make lasting friendships, find a marriage partner, start a job. We want that to happen in French.” – Jean-François Lisée Link

Let me tell you what journalist Lise Ravary said about that statement in the Journal de Montreal;

“As a colleague pointed out, replace the word "French" with the word "white" ... and it would have caused a scandal. We would have been talking about apartheid.” Link{Fr}

So it seems that our 'reasonable' Mr Lisée is deathly afraid of the mixing of the linguistic races.
I wonder how things would be perceived in Germany if a political leader would outline his goal of seeing Berlin returning to its Aryan roots.

At any rate Mr Lisée is just wrong in assuming that allowing the mixing of the pure-laine with dangerous anglophones in cegep will lead to anglicization through marriage.

A study by the English Montreal school board indicates that when Anglos and Francos partner or marry, in two-thirds of the cases, the children attend French school and in fact, French becomes the family language.
If anything Francophones attending English cegeps leads to francization, NOT anglicization!

Other ridiculous notions held by Mr. Lisée is his steadfast anger against so-called transfer schools, a hot button issue which really shouldn't be one.

Certain families, whose children are not eligible for English education under Bill 101 are using a loophole whereby they go to private English school for a couple of years (winning eligibility)  and then transfer to the public English system.

Mr. Lisée and the PQ are desperate to plug this avenue of escape and he rages on and on against the humiliating insult.
But the reality is that the number of students taking advantage is minuscule.
Plugging the loophole won't change a fig, the families have already made the decision to assimilate to the English side of the language equation and as the old saying goes, "You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink"......

While a couple of hundred students a year avail themselves of the loophole to gain access to an English education, over 10,000 students who ARE eligible for English schooling, voluntarily choose a French language educational path.
But this fact of course, is never mentioned.

Then Mr. Lisée explains to francophones that English instruction in the early years is hurtful to the development of French language skills, this without any scientific facts at all to back up his claim.

Another banal stupidity, oft repeated by Mr. Lisée, is when tells everyone not to worry, Quebecers are the most bilingual of all Canadians, a shamelessly stupid statement which shall be the subject of another post.

So let our community wake up, these radical Peequistes are not our friends and never will be.
They seek to dominate and subdue our community because they view English as an opposing force and never forget that they hold us responsible for holding up their sovereignty dream.

No matter how polite, no matter how seemingly cooperative and sympathetic, we must remember that Mr. Lisée and the Pq are our Devil.
Perhaps we need to take heed of Father Merrin's advice...