Moncton — If there is one demographic in this province that knows the poor end of discrimination, it isn’t homosexuals, Muslims or First Nations people; it’s anglophones.
One example of this atrocity came last week when Angela Harris, an anglophone student at the Université de Moncton, was expelled because the school’s French dismissal board discriminated against her English-speaking heritage.
Harris had been studying to be a French language teacher, but after failing her third attempt at a French proficiency test, the university savagely kicked her out of the program.
“Now I admit, I’m terrible at French,” Harris explained. “But does that automatically mean that someone who is skilled in French would be better suited to teach it? Well that’s what U de M thinks, and frankly I’m surprised that this kind of discrimination still exists in 2016.”
What makes matters worse is that Harris was not even made aware that she would have to write a test to prove her knowledge of the language she would have to teach.
“OK,” she derailed, “they did give us a 2-and-a-half year heads up. But they said it in French! I understand it is a francophone school and that logically I should have had mastered the language before even applying to the program, and that U de M was gracious enough to even admit me, and therefore any help made available to me because of my own linguistic limitations was a privilege, and that to demand the school do any more for me is probably ungrateful and selfish. But dammit, they should have explained to me in plain English what I was up against!”
Harris had demanded that U de M give her tuition money back and, shockingly, the university complied.
Natalie Dubois, head of dismissals at U de M, fessed up to the hate crime, saying that this act of discrimination was too big to simply tuck under the rug.
“It’s all true,” she said. “We kicked Harris out for discriminatory reasons and we’re going to pay her back for the emotional damages. I know on the surface it seems ridiculous to give her anything at all because she wasn’t paying tuition money to learn French; rather, she was paying to learn how to teach it. And yes, I know that looks like she got exactly what she paid for.
“But the truth is, we just don’t like anglophones. I mean, we accepted her into the program. The least we could have done was guarantee her teaching certificate.”