July 18, 2022
SHARE
CANADALAND
#798 Pardon My French
What's in a word? Especially when that word carries with it the pain of hundreds of years of racism? This week we talk about how the controversy over the public use of the N-word plays out differently in French and English in this country.
Jesse Brown
Host & Publisher
Sarah Lawrynuik
Senior Producer
Jonathan Goldsbie
News Editor
Tristan Capacchione
Audio Editor & Technical Producer
Kieran Oudshoorn
Managing Editor, Podcasts

When a CBC host used the N-word in pre-production meetings, she was taken off the air. When the French arm of the public broadcaster, Radio-Canada, had a program just months later where the N-word was used four times in both languages, the broadcaster dismissed charges that there was anything wrong with the program. That is, until the CRTC stepped in and said an apology was in order. 

Why two different responses at the same company in two languages? And why does the 1968 book by Pierre Vallières always seem to be at the heart of the controversy?
 

Featured in this episode: Emilie Nicolas, host of Canadaland’s French-language show Détours and columnist at Le Devoir

Further reading:

Support Canadaland at canadaland.com/join

Sponsors: oxio, CFUV, Calm, Article, Hover

More from this series
“…you have this attempt to actually change the Aurora Borealis. to affect it physically. This was called Project Waterhole. So they sent up a rocket with 100 kilograms of explosives, and exploded it in the Aurora Borealis band. Within two seconds, they had created a 40 kilometer wide hole in the Aurora Borealis.” - from The Forgotten Need to Probe the Sky
December 23, 2024
“Here's something that not many people know about the baby business.  There are ‘leg-men.’ We call them ‘leg-men’ though some of them are women, who make it their business to find pregnant women who are not married. The leg-men look for them in a million and one places. They meet them in bars and parks and cafes and all over. They hear things.”  - Eugene Moyneur (ex-wrester, ex-bodybuilder, baby-smuggler)
December 16, 2024
“The people who want to play morality police and decide who does or doesn't get to speak, they're not qualified arbiters of anything.” - Caryma Sa’d
December 9, 2024
Are dentists defrauding the Canadian government?
December 2, 2024
The Millenium Bug was supposed to bring the world to a halt, but governments claimed they squashed the problem. Was it all a panic over nothing?
November 28, 2024
“My job is to smuggle black market babies out of Canada and into the US. I’ve been at it off and on for the past 5 years. Maybe there’s an easier way to make a bankroll, but I don’t know it.” - Eugene Moyneur (ex-wrestler, ex-bodybuilder, baby-smuggler)
November 25, 2024
“Elon flipped out. He saw Substack as sort of like the number one competitor to X at the time. He banned discussion of the word Substack. And to this day, there's a lot of people who when they want to talk about Substack on Twitter, they write like, S star star B, like, like we're Voldemort or something.” - Chris Best, Substack co-founder and CEO
November 18, 2024
Is he a terrorist? Or a scapegoat?
November 11, 2024
all podcasts arrow All Podcasts
CANADALAND