CTV says: "Vive Steven, à bas Stéphane!"

Every so often the feeling sweeps over me that Canada, after almost four decades of official bilingualism, actually is a bilingual country. Year after year hundreds of thousands of young Anglophone Canadians seriously apply themselves to learning French. In federal elections like the one just wrapped up, we send platoons of Anglophone party leaders into Québec speaking a class of French that would not have been out of place in the era of Lester Pearson and John Diefenbaker. While their eloquence in French hardly ever wins a whole lot of seats there, they don't exactly get laughed out of the province either. The video above, partly rescued from the cutting room floor of CTV's Atlantic Canada branch, speaks volumes about the double standard in bilingual expectations for our national leaders. Let's leave aside the question of journalistic ethics, because that one is completely clear; the Harper-loving CTV network clearly has none.

When the matter of what Dion was being asked was sorted out, the interview went smoothly. However, there are some interesting aspects to the cutting-room-floor section that CTV thought everyone had to see. To a trained English grammarian, the clip is more damaging to the anchorman with the mellifluous delivery than it is to Stéphane Dion. Ted Baxter himself could not have mangled the subjunctive mood as completely as the CTV man does and he gets at least two runs at it. Our dear leader was all over the airwaves the day after CTV made its courageous decision, claiming that real leaders wear sweaters and don't get chances for "do overs." There was nary a whisper of concern about the national grammatical damage done to Canadian English when an anchor goes on air uncertain about his use of the subjunctive. You can see that Dion is really struggling to understand what the hell the man is actually asking him. French speakers take care with the subjunctive mood, because in French it does make a difference.

If you were Prime Minister for one day, what would you do first? I'd schedule an emergency snap quiz with no do-overs for our national Ted Baxter brigade on the subjunctive mood. It might not save us from economic catastrophe, but the acrobatic squirming would be as entertaining as a Busby Berkeley musical.