Vancouver 2010 gets $7.7M more in bilingual funding

Ottawa’s rushed bid to spend $7.7 million to beef up bilingualism at the Vancouver 2010 Olympics is just a bid to buy votes in Quebec, says a B.C. taxpayer watchdog. “I think they’re concerned about the vote in Quebec and they don’t want to do anything that might undermine that,” Maureen Bader, B.C. director of the Canadian Taxpayers’ Federation said Tuesday. “It’s simply a vote-buying exercise because of the possibility of an election this fall.” Two reports Tuesday harshly criticized 2010′s bilingualism program. Tuesday morning, Graham Fraser, Commissioner of Official Languages, took a swing at 2010 and other federal institutions, saying they still had a long way to go with French-language...