Air Canada CEO will retire this year after his English-only crash message was criticized

Damn so yall struggling with b**** ass 1%ers over there in Canada too huh?

No no the fracking is in Alberta, they speak English there

I'm a former Jazz employee. It's not the lack of French that bothers me - it's the lack of any sort of genuine emotion from the AC CEO in the press video. He's literally a robot reading off a teleprompter. Even worse, that fact that Jazz's president, Doug Clarke, has been essentially silent during this whole ordeal. There is one small quotation from the press release on the official website, nothing more. Jazz and AC are separate companies. Doug Clarke should have been delivering that video, not Rousseau. If I learned anything from working in the airline biz, it is that these individuals are evil, vile people. Rousseau can't even hide his depravity in a brief video. The wickedness doesn't stop at the C-suite, either. It seeps down to regional management, where they're just as horrific of human beings.

Yeah, 70s start sixty-ten, eleven, twelve etc… 80s are Four-twenty, twenty one, twenty two… Then 90s are four-twenty eleven, twelve … You get used to it once you get it, but it’s super weird.

Wait until you hear about Danish and their crazy numbers. 75 (seventy-five) in English is 70+5. In Danish, it is halvfjerdsindstyve, literally "half-fourth-times-twenty", or 5+(3.5*20).

One funny thing I learned is that in Swiss French they don’t do that and their counting system is much more intuitive lol septant octante for seventy eighty etc

I’m ashamed to say that it was the counting that made me tap out on French. I’m just not smart enough for my brain to make that transition conversationally. 

heh Japanese would like a word. Lots of countries have weird counting styles but the Japanese take it to extremes. There are a c*** ton of "counters" so you can say Ni (two) but then you have to specify whether it is small and round or long and thin or flat or a machine or a shoe thing or a whole lot of other variations. I had a friend say that if I could lean to count in Japanese I would be basically fluent. (let's ignore keigo) But then every language I learn has really crappy aspects. I mean Polish grammar could only have been invented by people that had long winter nights and no money for a play station. "I need to buy 3 boxes of tomato puree" Oh well you need to specify "I" in the grammar, then of course tomato is a male animate (I think? could be wrong, chicken meat is animate so I think tomatoes would be) and tomatoes are countable so probably change it to have an a at the end and then there were three so we need to change all this into plural and it was boxes you said so, at least here we don't need to consider whether there is a male in the plurality group or just female so that is easy, plus we have a declinated verb at the beginning so we can use infinitive after that another easy win" Muszę kupić trzy pudełka przecieru pomidorowego probably. And now you need to get your weak english speaker cheek muscles to to pronounce that. Plus it functionally servers no purpose that SVO does the job for except apparently "you can be more poetic". I am far from a poet in any language. At first when I was learning Polish my wife was a little upset when I said "stupid f****** language" constantly. But as we have learned a couple languages together she is totally on board now. Every language is stupider than your native language. There is actually a comedian that did a series of "Why Japan why?" standups which were fairly funny. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2icA1VaYg80](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2icA1VaYg80)

There were a dozen ways he could have made it work, but he either didn't bother, was unwilling or too shortsighted. If he's incapable or too uncreative to figure this out, how the hell is he running a big company?

Exactly this. Bilingualism is foundational to Canada. A lot of us do not speak French, but for Air Canada, an airline based in Montreal with a large percentage of employees who are Québecois (native French speaking) and fully bilingual, having a CEO who cannot speak French, even though he publicly committed to doing so five f****** years ago speaks volumes. Au revoir Monsieur Rousseau!

And immigrants come here and learn in 6 months, while working two jobs for minimum wage.

> Most CEOs in Canada don't speak French. Air Canada is a Crown and obligated to serve in both official languages. No one cares what language a non-Crown CEO speaks, so what you're saying has nothing to do with this.

Calisse

Upvote for not only a bilingual joke, but one that requires knowledge of Acadien french specifically.

Comment ça va buddy? Todo bien?

In french, we call it Franglais.

Ca c'est how ma mamam acadienne raised us chez nous-autres

Pomplemousse

Lived next to the Société St Jean Baptiste headquarters once, which is next to the Algerian consulate, and what brings everyone together in intrafracophone vivre ensemble is the Inuit panhandling in English.

Most people in Montreal don't seem to give a shit if you only speak English, from my experience. Then you have West Island which is mostly anglophone. Now once you get outside the city, that's when things change fast.

Montreal would hate if Bad Bunny played at their halftime show.

I've been there plenty and in almost every interaction I've had, be it random people or just ordering food, the moment I spoke English, their tone instantly changed to talk down to me. I've had people scream at me for speaking English with my friends while walking in a crowd. Shit is real.

Quebec is thirsty for any opportunity to make the French language look oppressed.

Ya. Putting everything else aside this is yet another example of people finding a way to make a tragedy about them.

Because it is part of a legal agreement that he was supposed to uphold and had already been taken to task about prior.

Pretty hard considering he doesn't speak French lmfao

As a Canadian who doesn’t speak a lick of French, pretty hard. You could give me a script in French and I wouldn’t be able to read it out “properly”

This is the real story behind it, that people are glossing over.

Carney was the one making a big ordeal about him not speaking French. So, yeah

Not just the language you speak, but the ONLY official language of your province, and the province of the company’s headquarters. It’s like having a company headquartered in Italy and not being able to speak Italian.

I honestly think there would be much less controversy. It's pretty ridic after apparently 300 hours in training he can't mumble out a few srntences in French though. Just reflects poor judgement on his part.

There might have been some grumbling from a few people, but it would mostly have been washed away in the news after a few days. Not giving a single word was directly seen as an insult.

If you live in Canada, this particular kind of controversy (lack of French) pops up decently often.  So not really random, but a quirk of our specific countries history and languages.

It's actually a very specific controversy for the people involved. 

Not at all. It's simple. The CEO has been criticised for refusing to put in the minimum effort. Further, he's claimed he took "300 hours of French classes." Somebody died, and he said a short message of condolence to the family. Even with a tiny bit of practice, anybody can do a pre-recorded and rehearsed message in French. The CEO's refusal to do so means that either he doesn't care enough about the family of somebody who died to put in any effort, or he lied, or both. Both of those things should indicate somebody isn't fit to be a CEO, and criticising him for being lazy or for lying is completely fair.

Just a message? Tell that to the families

Air Canada doesn’t control the FAA. They can stay in their lane and handle internal affairs. The CEO’s incompetence is an internal affair and it seems like they have handled it.

We can't care about two things? Not very surprising that the majority doesn't care about the minority.

This wasn’t a defunding issue. LaGuardia didn’t properly follow the FAA codes with the transponder for the vehicle and a decades long issue of LaGuardia (it was specified the headcount active in the tower at the time was standard) and other ATC’s running lean likely exacerbated it. Now as to funding for controllers in general, that’s an issue. However defunding likely wasn’t the driver here given LaGuardia wasn’t operating below historical normals

That should be the real controversy- flight attendant making barely liveable wage instead of raging about the CEO’s language. Dividing the working class with culture wars so they don’t have time to question the economic inequality. I say this as a bit of a Francophile myself.

Just so you know, I’m upset for you as an Ontarian. You must continue to preserve your culture or else we’ll all end up with the worst parts of American influence.

Monolingual Anglo here, from your bilingual neighbourghing province. The sheer disrespect that so many of my fellow Angelo's have for Francophones in both provinces is despicable. The failure to understand that after decades of persecution and attempts to quash the language and culture of Francophones, that the legal protections for French might be considered important. You know if the shoe was on the other foot, most Anglophones would not hesitate to raise a stink.

I like how that article from three years ago ends with Rousseau promising to improve his French. Spoiler: He did not.

Yeah I guess it’s not mandatory for CEO’s themselves because they privatized however communication from leadership is to be bilingual. After saying he would learn French, I guess he realizes his run is over.