Today In "I Can't Believe How Annoying 'Reconciliation' Is" News

In the 2016 census, only 96,575 people stated that they spoke Cree.

Out of 37 million people in a country which has only two official languages - English and French.

Well:

A school division in northern Saskatchewan is investigating after a staff member says she was told by a principal not to speak Cree.

Rose Bradfield, a janitor at the remote Timber Bay School, says the school’s principal told her last month that it wasn’t right for her to be speaking Cree and that it was rude.

Principal Daryl McKen said he became aware of an allegation this week but that it’s not true.

“There’s no truth to it,” McKen told The Canadian Press on Friday.

Bradfield, whose first language is Cree, is in her early 60s. She said she has worked at Timber Bay School for more than 10 years and sometimes speaks Cree on the job. Timber Bay is located about 260 kilometres north of Saskatoon near Montreal Lake.

Bradfield said she had been talking to a new staff member in Cree at the school, while another staff was member nearby.

The next day, she said, she went to talk to the principal about an issue involving a student and that’s when he told her she shouldn’t be speaking Cree. The staff member who heard the conversation the day before was also present.

If your workplace asks you to speak in only Sanskrit, then that is what you do. 

Secondly, as English is the lingua franca of the globe, one does no one any favours by speaking in a language only a handful of people speak.

Thirdly, it is rude. No one would go to this woman's home and speak only in Italian if that was a language no one there understood.