When bilingualism gets stupid

I am in love with languages, with French in particular. I also admire how much effort Canadians put into making this country bilingual (or even, as a courtesy for immigrants, multilingual). Of course, at times common sense loses and bilingualism takes weird shapes. Besides the recent Bill that requires Supreme Court Judges to be bilingual, other senseless things include:

• Canadian Embassy to Russian Federation in Moscow has their immigration section’s email address listed as mosco-immigration@international.gc.ca. Attention, this address is bilingual! If you don’t see it, the first word is spelt “mosco” which contains the common stem of both English “MOSCOw” and French “MOSCOu”. It is clear, that the spelling of their email address confuses the heck out of people because on the same page they have: “Please note that there is no ‘w’ or ‘u’ after ‘mosco’ in our email address – if you add ‘w’ or ‘u’ to make it ‘moscow’ or ‘moscou’ the message will not get to us. The address must be typed exactly as shown above.“  Did they really need to spend time and creative thought on making this address bilingual? Yes, I understand it’s a nice touch, but it seems to do more harm than good.
• If you look at the HTML code of many of the CIC webpages, the comments inside are in two languages too! You can find things like “<!– METADATA BEGINS | DEBUT DES METADONNEES –>” and “<!– TEMPLATE PRINT CSS BEGINS | DEBUT DU CSS DU GABARIT POUR L’IMPRESSION –>”

See, I really wish they spent more money on making Ontario more franco-friendly, as opposed to spending money on translating comments in the HTML files or making federal email addresses bilingual. Than again, maybe it’s just me.