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Ontario court receives ‘useless’ French document from Quebec counterpart

It is all fun and games until Quebec’s official aversion to English starts messing things up for other provinces.

Our francophone brethren has recently been on a tear against English, railing against stores and restaurants for overusing the language and promoting new laws that would essentially ban English from the province. It’s all French, all the time in Quebec. That is the name of the game.

And so is it any surprise that when an Ontario court requested court documents from its Quebec counterparts, they were presented in French only?

The National Post reports that when an Ontario judge requested a basic legal document for a sentencing hearing, she received a document so useless that she denounced it as a "disservice to the criminal justice system."

[ Related: Emotions run high at panel on future of English in Quebec ]

The document was deemed highly partisan and inflammatory, points compounded by the fact it was submitted late and in the wrong language.

According the Post, Justice Deena Baltman wrote:

[I]nstead of receiving something useful … the court [was] delivered a diatribe by a highly partisan and poorly trained probation officer. This is not only a waste of taxpayer’s monies but a disservice to the criminal justice system.

The fact that one arm of Canada's justice system would find a need to so severely chastise another cannot be seen as a positive sign. The Post notes this is not the first time a Quebec sentencing report has caused trouble for Ontario courts. In a case last year, the report was so biased the judge was forced to give the offender a lighter sentence.

[ More Brew: English language faces uncertain future in Quebec ]

Mixed into that is the notion that a Quebec court declined to provide the document in both official languages. Whether that was an official directive or the actions of a single Quebec probation officer, it is a signal that the province’s war on English is spreading to new battlefields.

Quebec's separatist government is in the process of introducing sweeping changes of it language laws, which would see some 155 amendments to the Charter of the French Language. The aim of Bill 14 is to scrape any language other than French from the province.

The Minister of Language will have the ability to strip communities of bilingual status, francophones in the military would not be allowed to send their children to English schools, and workplaces would be forces to conduct business in French.

And this, it would appear, could extend to dealings outside of the province as well. Which means Pastagate is just the tip of the iceberg. A recent column in the National Post called Bill 14 “a pathological attack on the sin of speaking English.”

Is Quebec poised to punish the rest of Canada for the same sin?