Monday, December 5, 2011

Gatinueau Gaffe

The city of Gatineau, Quebec has compiled a handy-dandy guide for newcomers detailing what is and isn't de rigueur behaviour in that burg:
One of Quebec’s biggest cities is throwing out the welcome mat to immigrants with a 16-point guide to local values, which range from refraining from bribing officials, killing people for honour, to cooking smelly foods.
The city of Gatineau says its newly released “statement of values” is aimed at helping newcomers integrate. But critics say it infantilizes them and treats immigrants “like they came out of a cave.”
Leaving aside the oddity that, on the scale of the unacceptable, "smelly foods" and "honour" crimes appear to have been given equal weight (I guess an ever worse faux pas would be to commit an "honour" crime while cooking something "smelly"), I don't think the folks who arrived here from, say, Waziristan or Somalia were exactly living it up in condos.

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