At Crooked Timber, Ingrid Robeyns has a teaser-​​post up announcing that she will write a longer post about the polit­ical crisis in Belgium. She men­tions that most non-​​Belgians (or per­haps, most non-​​Flemish) have trouble under­standing why lan­guage should be such a big deal. Canada is duti­fully men­tioned in the ensuing com­ments, and com­menter Alison adds this sum­mary of our national skills in consistency:

Re Canada:

In Quebec, even com­mer­cial signs must be in French. Outside of Quebec, com­mer­cial signs are in the lan­guage of the customers.

Document, ser­vices and signs tend to be in the lan­guages man­dated by the level of gov­ern­ment respon­sible for them. The air­port in Toronto is signed bilin­gually because of its fed­eral con­nec­tion. The cal­endar for munic­ipal garbage pickup is avail­able in many, many lan­guages, because Torontonians speak hun­dreds of them, and the gov­ern­ment wants people to put out the right sort on the right day. Provincial laws are bilin­gual in Ontario, but most public ser­vants are not. The courts have the capacity to operate in French, but it is infre­quent except where there is a high den­sity of Francophones.

Clear? Our weather is in Celsius and our ovens are in Fahrenheit. Our build­ings are in impe­rial and our roads are in metric. Our cheese is adver­tised in pounds, but the shelf signs are nor­mal­ized for com­par­ison in grams.

We are bilin­gual and mul­ti­cul­tural. Aboriginal people belong to First Nations, but are not included in the Constitution as a founding people, like the British and French. Quebecers tend to ignore the rest of us, but most of our prime min­is­ters (and all of the best ones) have been from Quebec.

There will be a quiz later.