Liberals quietly change French name of housing program

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OTTAWA — All it took was a few references to E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and some harsh words from the Parti Québécois leader for the tweak to happen.

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On Monday, the federal Liberals discreetly changed the French version of their proposed housing entity meant to accelerate the construction of affordable housing after they were mocked on social media for a name that was seemingly created with Google Translate.

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Speaking in Vaughan, Ont., Liberal Leader Mark Carney announced the creation of an entirely new entity, Build Canada Homes, which he described as a “lean, mission-driven organization” that would act as a developer to build low-cost housing at scale.

He then repeated the announcement in French, calling the entity “Bâtir Maisons Canada.” That same name was used in the official Liberal press release that morning.

Mathieu Bock-Cote, an influential conservative political columnist in Quebec, posted the words of the new robotic-sounding entity with an AI-generated picture of E.T. with Carney on X, the social media site formerly known as Twitter.

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“Bâtir Maisons Canada” is as grammatically incorrect as the extraterrestrial’s infamous phrase “E.T. phone home” in Steven Spielberg’s 1982 movie.

Others took issue with the poor quality of the French translation and took the opportunity to score some political points against the federal Liberals.

PQ Leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon said he was surprised to see people fail to see their “clear signs of contempt for Quebec” while Vincent Desmarais, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre’s Quebec adviser, called the Liberal leader “Google Translate Carney.”

Even former Liberal aide, Jeremy Ghio, tweeted that the French name evidently skipped a few stages of editing.

A few hours later, the name had changed to become simply “Maisons Canada.”

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It is not the first time that Liberals have come under fire for a poor French translation.

In 2019, the party used The Strumbellas’ “One Hand Up” as their official campaign song and got the group to interpret it in French. But the poor quality of the translation and people’s inability to understand the lyrics caused the party to stop using the song.

National Post
calevesque@postmedia.com

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