2023-08-19 04:00:00
A gourmet festival promoter is compared to a “cultural predator” after holding two different events in Trois-Rivières with signage almost entirely in English.
Two months ago, the promoter of PoutineFest de Trois-Rivières had sown controversy with its signs in English.
Now, the same promoter has landed again in this Mauricie city for the RibFest at the end of the week with once again a display almost exclusively in the language of Shakespeare.
“We simply ask you to respect the fact that you are arriving in the second oldest French-speaking city in North America,” exclaimed the coordinator of the Société Saint-Jean-Baptiste de la Mauricie, Pierre-Louis Paquin.
“There are provisions in Law 96 which require festivals that come to us to give us a slogan in French,” he added.
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Insolence
“The fact that they come back again with the same insolence, we can also accuse them of being cultural predators, plague for his part the president of Impératif français Jean-Paul Perreault. A festival that woos the Quebec clientele and that does not even display in French, it’s muddy! »
Interviewed by Le Nouvellistethe promoter of the events, Leslie Gagné, posed as a victim of the media who, according to him, unfairly treated the affair as a controversy.
The City of Trois-Rivières authorized the holding of this event by renting the land.
The City takes care of the that is posted outside the perimeter reserved for the activity only. In this case, writing in English is on the reserved ground, so nothing to do at the municipal level except perhaps to educate developers.
“When the City says ‘yes’ to an event, it’s because it believes it has positive spin-offs. Can events improve? Always,” added the spokesperson for the City of Trois-Rivières, Mikaël Morrissette.
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Disappointing
This position disappoints Mr. Perreault, who believes that the City
should have challenged the festival to demand that it “adapt” to the French-speaking reality of Quebec.
“They should have made a much more responsible statement about Quebec and its identity,” he laments.
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