Canada’s bilingual regime

TORONTO—A refreshing feature of Preston Manning’s Reform and Stockwell Day’s Canadian Alliance parties was their refusal to defer to conventional wisdom. They raised issues that had been more or less suppressed in the nation’s capital: immigration levels, affirmative action programs, the imposition of party discipline, the virtual monopoly that Quebecers had on the Prime Minister’s Office, and asymmetrical administrative agreements with Quebec. The most provocative sortie of these Western Canadian-based parties was their assault on bilingualism. Unlike other policy or process issues, the incendiary language issue touches on the symbolic order of the regime fashioned by the bargain of 1867. The Fathers of Confederation had purposefully structured the polity in a manner that deviated from the practice of its peoples. They had asked mother Britain for a “Constitution similar in principle to that of the United Kingdom” and a federal system akin to that of the United States, but they incorporated bilingualism into their one common central institution, Parliament. At the time, English- and French-speaking Canadians largely lived in separate worlds. They still do. Indeed, the solitudes have grown further apart as more French Canadians outside of Quebec have intermarried, assimilated, and lost their facility in French; they have adopted English as their language of work, home, and play and there has been a steady decrease in the rate of transmission of French from parents to children. Simultaneously, Quebec’s anglophones, who accounted for a majority of Montrealers a century ago, have become an ever-shrinking minority. While the percentage of Canadians claiming to be bilingual has increased in the past half century the increase is largely because more Quebecers, francophones and anglophones, can now conduct a conversation in the other’s language. To be sure, there has been an explosion of French immersion schooling in the rest of Canada but few of the graduates live or dream in the language. They may understand and appreciate French, but they consume little in the way of French media and they do not initiate conversations in the language. They hail disproportionately from upper-middle and upper class families who perceive that French will boost employment prospects, especially in government. Ottawa gave up on its expensive foray into French-language training for civil servants because it did not produce much change: they simply continued speaking English in the workplace. The government turned to increasing the number of job postings that require applicants to be competent in both official languages. Nevertheless, relatively few anglophone civil servants use French in going about their work. Language has always been a flashpoint in the relationship between English and French Canadian societies. After the vilification of an Alliance MP for his attack on Ottawa’s administration of bilingualism and its costs, Stephen Harper rallied to his defence. “Enforced national bilingualism,” he wrote, had “attained the status of a religion” as sacred dogma that had been foisted on Canadians by the Liberal party and the liberal media. One might have thought that when he became Prime Minister, Harper had the opportunity to reverse the bilingual administrative regime, what he termed “the god that failed.” As an ordinary Western Canadian, Harper could express the ‘politically incorrect’ views of other ordinary Western Canadians. As Prime Minister, however, Harper found himself bound by the regime of 1867. Indeed, he has gone further: he declared the Québécois a nation and he compels his ministers to insert French in all their official pronouncements however mauled their delivery and however ignorant the audience is of the language. Harper had asserted, as had John Diefenbaker, that official bilingualism contributed neither to fairness nor to national unity and that “A unilingual anglophone or unilingual francophone is as much a ‘real Canadian’ as a bilingual one.” However, this has not proven to be the case when it comes to those who work for the government. Initially, civil service recruitment privileged unilingual anglophones. Now, it privileges francophones. How did it come to this? As a student in Paris in the 1940s, Gérard Pelletier had been shocked to find that when he went to the Canadian embassy no one could serve him in French. Once “French power” came to Ottawa in 1968 and he served as Pierre Trudeau’s culture minister things changed. Francophones, once dramatically underrepresented in the civil service, especially in its managerial ranks, are now substantially overrepresented. The cost of bilingual services has been considerable: the Fraser Institute estimates the annual federal and provincial bill to be $2.4-billion. There has been loose talk of institutionalizing multilingual government services to reflect Canada’s multicultural character. To be sure, Punjabi in Surrey and Chinese in Markham are more commonly spoken than is French, but Graham Fraser, Canada’s commissioner of official languages, has pointed out that though almost a half million Canadians spoke Ukrainian at home in the 1950s, by the 1980s only 45,000 did. The number now is much smaller still. If Quebec becomes a separate state, the regime of 1867 will be over and the time would be ripe to revisit the language issue in the newly-reconfigured Canada and the newly-constituted Quebec. The communities likely to lose the most will be francophones in the rest of Canada and anglophones in Quebec. In neither state will other languages, with the possible exception of aboriginal ones, likely have much status. Nelson Wiseman teaches political science at the University of Toronto. news@hilltimes.com The Hill Times

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Canada’s bilingual regime

The two solitudes have grown further apart as more French Canadians outside of Quebec have intermarried, assimilated, and lost their facility in French.

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