For any Canadians out there.......... READ, ACT, AND SEND THIS TO OTHERS!! -- ELI KOULAKIS, 73, lives in the town of Beaconsfield, Quebec. She was born in Montreal, the daughter of Greek immigrants. She spoke English her whole life, went to school in English, writes, reads, works, and dreams in English. But because her mother spoke to her in Greek 70 years ago, the Government of Quebec says she can't be counted as English-speaking when deciding if a town should be ALLOWED to serve people in English. JOSSI RABINSKY, 82, came to Montreal with his parents when he was Three-years-old. He grew up near Park Avenue and eventually raised a family of his own in Cote St. Luc. He paid his taxes, went to school in English, and lived his entire life speaking English. But because his parents spoke Russian to him at home - 80 years ago - the government REFUSES to count him as English-speaking. there are thousands more from our communities who have the same story. They lived their life primarily in English but now the government won't count them as English-speaking. STATISTICS Over 1 million people in Quebec speak English as their preferred official language. But only 650,000 were spoken to by their parents in English when they were kids. And it's this difference in numbers - some 350,000 - that the government is trying to deny are English-speaking so that they can reduce English-language services in Quebec. How? You probably know that the government passed a law to merge towns and cities on the Island of Montreal (Bill 170). This forced merger will erase - forever - towns founded and built by English-speaking Quebecers. The new mega-city will have a French majority and, therefore, according to Quebec law with be a unilingual French city. No bilingual street signs. No bilingual fire departments. No bilingual parking tickets. The government says they will create bilingual "burroughs." But these burroughs won't have any real powers. The people who will serve in these burroughs (police, judges, fire fighters, clerks, etc.) won't be required to speak English because they are hired by the mega city - NOT the "bilingual" (burrough.) HOW THIS COMPARES TO ONTARIO If Montreal was part of Ontario, this wouldn't be an issue. Ontario forces towns with at least 10 percent French-speaking residents to AUTOMATICALLY provide bilingual services. In Quebec, a town has to be 50 percent non-francophone to be able to request English-language services. It is ILLEGAL for a town to provide ANY English-language services unless 50 percent of the residents are non-francophone! But even THESE obstacles aren't good enough for the Quebec government. It gets worse! While everyone was distracted with the mergers law (Bill 170), the government quietly passed another law making it even more difficult to get bilingual services (Bill 171). It is not enough for a town to be 50 non-francophone. The new law now says that we have to be 50 percent "mother-tongue English". That means that those 350,000 English-speaking people like Eli Koulakis and Jossi Rabinsky won't count because their parents spoke another language to them at home when they were kids. (Almost done. Please read on.) IT'S TIME TO ACT The Quebec government has made its intentions clear. First they prevent immigrants from attending our schools. Hundreds of our school closed forever. Then they intimidated our local stores with language inspectors. Many were fed up and moved away. And now they want to erase the only level of government that we control. They want to remove our bilingual street signs. The government has made us feel unwelcome in our own province. Now they want us to feel unwelcome in our own towns. We can prevent them from doing it. But we need everyone's help. Please help. Write to your local federal Member of Parliament and ask them to help our towns in court. As you may know, our towns are challenging these laws in court. The federal government has the power to become an "intervener", which basically means they will join our towns in saying this law violates the Constitution because it will strip our minority community of our institutions. Please, write to your federal Member of Parliament today and write to the Minister of Justice. Time is running out. Please do it today before it is too late! [Example] below just copy and paste to any word doc changing my name to your's and print!!! Hon. Anne McLellan Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada House of Commons Parliament Buildings Ottawa, ON K1A 0A6 E-Mail: McLellan.A@parl.gc.ca Dear Minister: As you may know, a group of municipalities on the Island of Montreal is before the courts arguing that Quebec Bill 170 (to force mergers legislation) is unconstitutional because it attempts to abolish institutions of the English-speaking community. We ask that the Government of Canada intervene in the case - as was done in the Montfort Hospital case in Ontario - to help our community preserve our Basic institutions. Sincerely, PLEASE SEND THIS E-MAIL MESSAGE TO EVERYONE YOU KNOW! IT IS TOO IMPORTANT AN ISSUE TO REMAIN SILENT! _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com