MONTREAL — When National Bank president Louis Vachon last week refused to fire a vice-president at National's Montreal headquarters who doesn't speak French, he said he "will not go English-hunting at the bank."
Elsewhere, however, the sport of unilingual-anglo hunting is growing in popularity.
Long restricted to captains of the Montreal Canadiens and clerks in stores on Ste. Catherine St., the hunt has recently been extended to holders of high federal office and managers in Montreal financial institutions.
And now even private citizens who do not serve a French-speaking public or have authority over French-speaking employees are becoming fair game.
Ironically, these unilingual anglos were first targeted by an English-language Montreal radio program.
Last week, the CBC's morning Daybreak program discovered two anglophones living in the hipster-infested Mile End district who hadn't learned French after several years in Montreal.
It declared the two a trend — "a new genus of 21st-century unilingual anglophone" — and invited them into its studio for a gentler version of a Maoist-show trial and public shaming for refusing to learn French.
This led to a Twitter fight between myself and Daybreak that established that the program could neither prove that its "new genus" of wilfully unilingual anglos actually existed nor explain why it would matter to anybody but its own members if it did.
This, in turn, brought sovereigntist strategist Jean-Francois Lisee galloping to Daybreak's rescue.
In his blog on L'Actualite magazine's website, Lisee produced evidence in the form of an anecdote about a party in Mile End in a two-year-old magazine article.
He also put out a call to readers to recount fresher anecdotes about anglophones who had moved to Montreal several years ago and still refused to learn French.
The hunt for anglo dinosaurs was on.
More than a hundred of Lisee's readers reported their own sightings, and Lisee published "the cream" of their testimony in a subsequent blog post.
Never mind that Bill 101 was never meant to make everybody in Quebec speak French, any more than the federal Official Languages Act was meant to make everybody in Canada bilingual.
So it is not actually against the law in Quebec for individuals not to speak French.
Well, not yet at least, though television personality Guy A. Lepage said recently it should be an "obligation for everybody" to do so.
Actually, Daybreak's "new genus" isn't new. There have been unilingual anglos living in Montreal for the past 351 years, since the British captured the city.
And, although it would have deprived him of a couple of blog posts, Lisee could have found more complete evidence of the presence of unilingual anglos simply by consulting the results of the 2006 census.
It turns out that his readers missed quite a few of them.
There were 209,725 people living on the island of Montreal at the last census who spoke English but not French.
And there were 262,810 in the Montreal census-metropolitan area, which also includes Laval and mainland suburbs.
Even so, it appears that unilingual-anglo Montrealers are what conservationists might consider a "near-threatened" species.
Statistics Canada couldn't provide me with census data on bilingualism among anglos at the local level. But in 2006, 68.6 per cent of Quebec anglos, who are concentrated in the Montreal area, said they were bilingual.
That represented a steady increase, from 66.1 per cent at the 2001 census and 61.7 per cent five years before that.
And it was twice the 35.8-per-cent bilingualism rate of French-speaking Quebecers, besieged as they are by the surrounding English-speaking hordes.
That's an exceptional phenomenon. Try to think of another community of comparable size of speakers of the world's dominant language, so many of whom have adopted a second language.
And it began nearly a decade before the adoption of the first pro-French legislation in Quebec, when anglophones in St-Lambert initiated the first French-immersion classes in 1965.
In fairness, it's not always easy to spot bilingual-Montreal anglos.
Here's another anecdote about language in Montreal: sometimes I address a stranger in French, begin an exchange in that language and only realize after a while that I'm speaking French to another anglophone.
But then, nobody's looking for those anglophones anyway. It seems to be more gratifying to hunt down the ones who still conform to old stereotypes for trophies, especially since they are getting to be harder to find.
dmacpherson@montrealgazette.com