losing my memory, saving my face On Saturday an editorial was published in the Ottawa Citizen that I could relate to. It was about a topic that I've written about before and have begun to feel more and more frustrated about the longer I live in Ottawa unable to get a job.

It's SO French here that temp agencies won't even consider you unless you're bilingual. I've done all the same things here to find work as I would in Calgary: scan all the ads, register with a bunch of agencies, take all their competency tests, but when I tell them that my French isn't so good, it's good-bye Charlie!

In this piece he talks more about people having a hard time getting promoted within the government, but my job search has shown that to even get an entry-level position, most of the time bilingualism is expected. Here are some excerpts from "Bilingualism a very low glass ceiling in Public Works":

• In the national capital region, 75 percent of all Public Works jobs are designated bilingual. In the supervisory ranks, there are 1,331 positions and all but 76 are designated bilingual.
• The bilingual federal workplace is an idea that is 40 years old. It was originally intended to offer fairness to francophones and anglophones, but in the end, it is fair to neither. Only the bilingual are benefiting from the system that has evolved and the government's unwillingness to offer language training on the scale it did in the past ensures that the situation will continue.
• Only 17.7 percent of Canadians are bilingual and only 8.8 percent of anglophones can speak both official languages.
• Here is the cold reality. In the national capital region, our federal government is only interested in people with a high degree of bilingualism. Other Canadian aren't welcome, and if they do manage to get on the first rung of the employment ladder, they will be stuck there. That's grossly unfair to the majority of the Canadian population and it greatly narrows the talent pool for the federal government. That makes it bad public policy.
  

Next week I'm taking my oral assessment for French. I'm still in the running for a position at the Justice Department, but I need to get a B on this test. The reality is that I wouldn't want to speak French in my workplace anyway, so it seems like a pointless exercise.

Je veux travailler encore dans le monde des Anglais.  | ¶ 7:43 p.m.