What would an Ignatieff government look like?

A lot more jobs off limits to people who don't speak French -- including anyone who works at an airport, seaport, ferry terminal, etc.

Here's my new Sun column on the subject:

What would Michael Ignatieff do differently if he were prime minister?

Take a look at Bill S-220, proposed by his party in the Senate. S-220 would amend Canada’s bilingualism laws.

For starters, it would require all RCMP patrolling the Trans-Canada Highway to speak French.

Hundreds of English-speaking RCMP officers would have to be fired, including almost all aboriginal RCMP officers and minorities in cities like Vancouver, where the RCMP has recruited South and East Asian officers.

But it’s not just anti-minority and anti-English. It’s anti-common sense.

How many people driving the Trans-Canada from, say, Grand Falls, N.L., to Gander speak only French and therefore need a French-speaking highway cop? Not many.

And how many Newfoundland cops would qualify for a new bilingual-only RCMP detachment? Not many. Probably not any.

Canada’s current bilingualism laws require federal government services to be provided in French where numbers warrant. For most of the Trans-Canada Highway, the numbers don’t warrant it. Yet Ignatieff insists only bilingual officers be allowed to patrol any of it.

Except in Quebec. It has its own provincial police force, called the Surete du Quebec.

Bill S-220 doesn’t require those 5,000 officers to learn English. Ignatieff wouldn’t dare, because bilingualism, to him, isn’t a two-way street. Ignatieff wouldn’t ask Quebec to abandon its anti-English sign laws that violate the Charter of Rights.

No, to Ignatieff, forced bilingualism is a tool to beat up anglophone westerners (translation: Conservative voters) to the delight of Liberal voters in Montreal and Toronto.

‘Cranky old men’

It’s the wedge strategy proposed by Liberal strategist and CBC pollster Frank Graves, who advised Ignatieff he “should invoke a culture war” against the West and “if the cranky old men in Alberta don’t like it, too bad.”

But S-220 also applies to “all airports, railway stations, ferry terminals and ports that are significant because of their location or number of passengers they serve.” So the ports of St. John’s and Vancouver would have to be fully bilingual. The same with airports in Edmonton, Regina and St. John’s.

This would apply to everyone working at the airport, ferry terminal or port, including “third party contractors such as restaurants or car rental agencies.”

My own observations suggest the majority of workers in airport food courts and car rental desks are new immigrants, for whom English is already a second language. S-220 wouldn’t allow them to work there anymore until they learned French, too. Try doing that at age 45 while raising a family and working 70 hours a week.

There’s no other way to say it: S-220 is a bigoted, punitive, divisive law.

Ignatieff claims he wants to win the West. What does his Vancouver lieutenant, Senator Mobina Jaffer, have to say about what this bill will do to new immigrants, like she once was?

‘Noble’ bill

She calls the bill “noble” and “necessary.” She says the Vancouver Olympics made her “angry” because opening ceremonies didn’t include more French. And she has a warning for unilingual workers: Merely learning “translated sentences and memorized lists of words” isn’t enough — their French had better be “of the same quality” as their English.

Jaffer’s own French isn’t. But so what? She’s a Liberal senator. Unlike thousands of threatened cops, waiters, clerks and longshoremen, she has got a job until age 75.

But she has got some helpful tips for those about to lose their jobs: “My husband and I decided that our children would learn the three languages of the Americas, namely French, English and Spanish. It meant sending our children to Quebec and Mexico many times,” she boasted.

Got that, you minimum wage-earning immigrants? Send your kids on junkets to Quebec and Mexico. Ignatieff’s Liberals just gave you some free advice, and you’re probably not even grateful.