Jason McBride created the group after being denied employment in the service industry because of his inability to speak French. He claims that official bilingualism is bankrupting our province and leaving Anglophones like himself under-qualified and unemployed. In an interview with the CBC, he claimed to have received “passionate responses” of support from members of New Brunswick’s Anglophone and Francophone communities who support his cause.

To an extent, I see where McBride is coming from. He lives in an Anglophone community and doesn’t understand why he can’t get a job in his city without French skills. He is also frustrated by the lack of adult French education programs in this province, and in that respect I completely agree. There should be government resources in place for those who want to learn their province’s official languages.

However, McBride speaks about a bilingual province as if all Francophone residents are fluent in English. He expresses a severe lack of cultural and historical awareness of his home province, though these are keys to the discussion. Take Sackville as an example: If you were to examine the culture of Sackville based on the Mount Allison campus, it is easy to say that we live in a community full of young, well-educated hipsters. But this generalization does not represent Sackville as a whole, just like the culture and language preferences of Saint John do not represent the culture of New Brunswick as a whole.

My message to anyone who agrees with the views put forward by this Facebook group is to put yourself in the shoes of a unilingual Francophone New Brunswicker. When you access services such as hospital care, you are served in your official language of choice. As a result of our colonial history, this is your constitutional right as a New Brunswicker, according to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Take, for example, a Caraquet hospital deciding to solely provide public services in French. According to the 2011 census, of the 4,030 residents of Caraquet, 65 are Anglophone. Based on those figures, according to the majority rules argument put forward by McBride, it would be “fiscally irresponsible” for this hospital to provide services in English. If McBride then found himself in need of medical attention in Caraquet, the hospital would refuse to serve him in English. They would therefore defy his constitutional rights, just as he has suggested that we do to the French minority in southern New Brunswick. I don’t believe he would take too kindly to this prospect.

This is far more than a monetary issue. It is an issue of respecting cultural differences and our province’s history. The inability to speak English does not make anyone less of a New Brunswicker, and ultimately, to eliminate official bilingualism would segregate unilingual Francophones and marginalize Acadian communities.

Rachel Thornton, a third-year fine arts student, unveiled her exhibition entitled “Then so Be It” at the START Gallery this Friday. Thornton describes her work as “revolving around the idea of collecting objects, collecting small moments or hand gestures, and collecting symbols.” Although this obsessive collection defines her work on a surface level, it is more appropriately described as a collection of symbols which allude to religion, feminism, and the intersection of the two themes.

Thornton used a variety of media to fill the space of the gallery with complex imagery that ranged from gold painted found objects that sit on two shelves suspended from the ceiling, to large intricate circular drawings and paintings, to lithograph prints of her hands scattered on the wall.

The main goal of the project was to explore her interest in religion, and her personal connection with spirituality. The obsessive mark-making evident in the large, circular drawings that depict imagery from Christianity, Judaism, Paganism, voodoo, and witchcraft are examples of how the process of creating can put the artist into a contemplative or meditative state that Thornton equates with spirituality.

“It was like a learning process,” Thornton said. “I was never really religious when I was younger and my family isn’t super religious, but I think that it is really easy to identify with a lot of Christian values; although, I can also identify with pagan values, and the stories that come from those religions.”

Thornton notes that she practices her own spiritual rituals in an unorthodox manner. “My whole life I’ve always collected these strange, small, and shiny objects… anything that’s small and free, I have to have it.” By painting these objects with gold dust and displaying them as if they were presented at a museum, she is able to convey their ambiguous and perhaps objectively arbitrary importance to the viewer by re-presenting mundane objects as religious idols.

Because Thornton combines and connects distinct symbols from a variety different religions,

she believes that she can connect with a wider audience. “Religion is so important in finding your community, and being able to connect with other individuals, and I think that art is a way to do that,” she said.

Thornton has also been examining the historic role of women in the church—specifically how they have been represented as villains in many religions. She is able to depict this idea through imagery related to selkies and witches—two mystical creatures from different ideologies that personify the exclusion of women from organized religion as a whole.

“[Feminism] is not at the forefront of my work, but it is becoming more important to me… and I think that the fear of empowering women is something that is personified in witches and selkies,” she said.

One of the primary recurring images in the exhibition is the image of Thornton’s hands. This motif is used as a way to explore the historical norms of both religion and the home, and how a woman’s role has traditionally been to create a functioning domestic life. The simple act of creating work is a way of expressing this idea of gender roles within organized religion.

Thornton’s exhibition can be seen at Struts Gallery on 7 Lorne St. until Tuesday, Feb. 18.