Montreal Transit workers refuse to serve English speaking customers...Transit won't say, well anythign about it.

Again, sifting through the news on my lunch hour I stumbled across this article in Sun News by Giuseppe Valiante about a Montreal Transit worker refusing to serve an English-speaking appointed minister. This incident also seemed to take place with two other soccer players a few weeks prior.

From what was said in the article, this minister went to buy a day-pass and was laughed at by transit employees and told “We don’t serve English people.” Now before I get cracking on what I think about this, I realize that this is (hopefully) individuals acting on their own accord and not the company.

So, how do you justify telling someone that you don’t serve English people? I realize that Montreal is primarily a French-speaking town, but at the same time they need to realize that Canada does have two official languages, and English is one of them. Last time I checked Montreal and Quebec were not part of their own country yet. This also leads into service. Should transit/ city employees have a basic knowledge of both official Canadian languages? I don’t think that it needs to come as far as that. I feel that if you’re living in a city that is primarily French over English then you shouldn’t be forced to learn both languages, but you should have 24/7 access to English-speaking resources in your line of work. If someone cannot speak French there is absolutely no reason for them to be turned away, but you need to have some kind of identifier to only-english and only-french speaking people that you are bilingual or solely French or English.

I think that it’s terrible that these employees decided to take it upon themselves to decide what the mandate for Montreal transit will be, to them I say, you should probably deflate your ego slightly and think about what you say before you say it as, in this case, you might tell off a person in government.

The second part of this story that bothered me was the communications decision with not releasing any information to the public about the investigation/ results of the investigation on the transits end. I realize that they probably have a very good reason for that decision, I couldn’t tell you what it is, but it’s probably there. I think, especially with a public company like transit, you need to be transparent especially when it comes to someone being basically insulted for being English. People want to know that they’re being taken care of, they want to know that something is being done to protect them. Not ever finding out if anything happened to someone who was turned down service because they couldn’t speak French is not a small issue, it’s something that many people would take to heart. You don’t have to release the name of the employees, but much like the TTC does, a simple “the employee has been reprimanded” is enough to quell some of the unrest. More than “we’re not going to tell you what happened because that’s that.”

Obviously people are not going to put their trust in you if A) your employees on numerous occasions are treating people like that and B) the only thing you acknowledge is that you refuse to acknowledge anything.

All information comes from the article “Montreal transit workers refuse to serve English-speaking minister by Giuseppe Valiante.

http://www.sunnewsnetwork.ca/sunnews/canada/archives/2012/07/20120713-141437.html