And regarding Boris Johnson, he plays at being a bumbler, but it’s all just an act. This YouTube video from Last Week Tonight with John Oliver talks about this.
I’ll first give my explanation why I believe bilingualism and multiculturalism to be incompatible, in the Canadian context, and then I’ll respond to specific parts of @Northern_Piper’s good posts. (Note that @Northern_Piper is correct in his response to @LSLGuy that what we’re talking about is bilingualism as a legal policy, or at least as a sense that two specific languages are given special recognition in the country, not personal bilingualism or multilingualism.)
My argument is one of political philosophy. While @Northern_Piper traces the roots of Canadian bilingualism to the Constitution of 1867, in its current form it dates to the 1960s. At that time, essentially in response to the rise of modern Quebec nationalism (both its liberal forms, for example political parties like the RIN and RN, and later the PQ, and its radical, Marxist forms like the FLQ), Canada decided that it needed to officially recognize the dual language nature of the country. This was done by means of the Laurendeau-Dunton commission, which led to the establishment of the Official Languages Act and other bilingual policies.
However, some cultural groups that had been present in Canada for a long time, notably the Manitoba Ukrainians, disagreed with the idea of Canada being recognized as “bicultural”. They thought that they had an equally valid argument as anglophones and francophones as for why they could be considered a “Founding People” of Canada. And from what I know of the settlement of the Prairies, they had a point. I strongly disagree with the idea that all Canadians except First Nations and Inuit are “immigrants”: there’s a major difference between colonists, who’ve built the country they settled in, and immigrants, who’ve moved to an already-existing country. Francophones and anglophones have built this country, at least in part, and I say this while recognizing that indigenous Canadians were here first and that they were subject to systemically racist policies. But look at Canadian history and you’ll see that even before the Conquest, francophones were referred to as Canadiens and had bilateral relations, sometimes alliances and sometimes wars, with indigenous nations. A nation was being built. Similarly, when the federal government decided to settle the Prairies, it admitted a large number of colonists from central and eastern Europe, who established their own communities there along with cultural institutions (newspapers in their own language, etc.). The argument that they should be seen as colonists rather than immigrants has merit and has to be considered.
Canada responded to this by adopting the policy of multiculturalism. And here I’m thinking about it more in social and political terms, about what it means for Canadians’ self-perception, than in terms of actual law. The idea of two founding peoples was essentially deprecated (the fact that it excludes indigenous Canadians makes it very open to attack), and today only some federalist Quebecers would still argue for it or for variants of it. Canada is now seen as a single, indivisible nation, but that somehow has no national culture other than the sum of the identities of all people who live there. This was at first a very liberal and individualistic policy, as per staunchly liberal former prime minister Pierre Trudeau, but today seems to incorporate ideas from modern progressivism which is decidedly less liberal. But Canadians truly value this idea and consider it the cornerstone of their identity; I’ll link to François Charbonneau’s essay from 2004 (in French) where he details what he believes are the consequences of this for Quebec.
But if 1) Canada is a single, indivisible nation, and 2) Canada has no national culture other than multiculturalism, which recognizes as Canadian the identities of everyone living in Canada, how does this jibe with 3) Canada must recognize two official (national?) languages, specifically, English and French? The first two axioms would seem to me to imply that Canada must either have no official language, and leave anything having to do with language policy to local authorities, or make official all languages that are spoken (or signed!) in Canada, which is impossible. Or maybe have a single official language, considered as the language through which interactions between different identity groups will proceed. If you decide to have one official language (English) outside Quebec, and one official language (French) inside Quebec, you’re creating Quebec nationalism, which is the option I agree with but definitely contradicts axiom 1. If you have two official languages (English and French) everywhere in Canada, this causes a lot of friction with axiom 2, and causes the anti-bilingualism response we see, with anglophones wondering why they’re expected to know French, at least in order to get some jobs, even though nobody speaks it where they live (or even though people do speak it, but they speak English as well). You’re also sort of resurrecting the two founding peoples, with all the anti-Native accusations that this can expose you to. If you have a single official language (English) all over Canada, you’ll also cause problems, which @Northern_Piper alludes to when he mentions Quebec’s political power, but this power is declining. I think this is where we’re going, maybe not in terms of actual law, but at least in terms of how Canadians view their country. We already see that Montreal is no longer seen as a francophone city but as a “bilingual” city, which in practice means that English is the language that has to be used, at least between people of different cultural backgrounds. And we see it with anglophones visiting Quebec and expecting that everyone should speak English with them, and if they don’t it’s obviously because they’re being “rude”.
What is interesting is that almost nobody seems to be raising this idea that bilingualism and multiculturalism are in conflict, which to me is totally obvious. The reason, I guess, is that francophone Quebecers either don’t really value or actively dislike multiculturalism, so they don’t really care that it conflicts with bilingualism, while anglophones either actively ignore it (since the Meech Lake and Charlottetown accords and the 1995 referendum, the mood seems to be that these are things you not only shouldn’t mention but shouldn’t even think about), or dislike bilingualism so they don’t care that it conflicts with multiculturalism. Which some of them might even dislike as well. The only arguments I’ve seen for reconciling these two ideologies come from francophones outside Quebec, like this piece from senators Raymonde Gagné (former rector of the Université de Saint-Boniface in Winnipeg) and René Cormier. It’s an interesting piece, very Canadian if you ask me, and having experience of the student body at the Université de Saint-Boniface (one third native Manitoba francophones, one third French immersion students, one third international students from African francophone countries who sometimes don’t speak English on arrival) I can understand why Gagné stresses French’s role in accommodating diverse immigrant families, but the point is that’s not the reason why French is an official language of Canada. Otherwise, why not make other international languages like Spanish, or Arabic, official as well, and open up to even more potential immigration.
Universal medical insurance in Canada started under Lester Pearson’s government.
An interesting thought piece. But I don’t agree with the assumptions. Canada is a single nation that has not yet managed to accommodate interprovincial free trade. People divide it into regions all the time. Although “multicultural” is defined in many ways and put on a pedestal by some, it is in no way is the sum total of Canadian culture even if it calls citizens “Canadian”.
Montreal is far from a functionally anglophone city, for at least 30 years and probably before.
I respect language and there are some inequities in preferring French. But that doesn’t change the historical or legal precedents. It’s not primarily because of anything to do with immigration. Canada can respect other cultures without giving their language official status. I think all Canadians should speak French but still would rather see merit and many other qualities take precedence over this ability. Faites attention aux baobabs. L’essential est invisible pour les yeux.
Boris is a prime mover behind Brexit, and most of the people who voted for brexit did so on xenophobic and racist grounds. Perhaps Johnson isnt a racist but he certainly panders to them. The same could be said for trump.
And the Cabinet was badly split over it. MacEachern was strongly pro; Mitchell Sharp was against, because of the financial implications. MacEachern made noises about resigning, which in a minority situation could have been disastrous for Pearson. Ultimately, the Cabinet approved it, but on a more restricted basis than Emmett Hall had proposed in his report. That why drugs and dentistry are not part of Medicare.
This is my problem with Hypnagogic Jerk’s many complaints about multiculturalism; HJ ascribes vastly more importance to the theory of multiculturalism than anyone in English Canada actually does, and seems to think multiculturalism is something it’s not.
What multiculturalism actually means in practice is just being tolerant that other people are different. That’s literally it. If someone else wears a turban, or likes jerk chicken, or celebrates Yom Kippur, the idea is that you’re supposed to be cool with that. There is no conflict between that concept and bilingualism; it’s a profound absurdity. So where does that strange idea come from? Well, here we go:
… But the only person saying “Canada has no national culture other than multiculturalism” is Hypnagogic Jerk. No one in English Canada says that; it’s a ridiculous straw man. Of course there are some commonly held values. They may not be cultural touchstones that are OFFICIALLY recognized or forced on people - which is fine, because no real culture needs government to prop it up - and they may not be the sort of cultural touchstones Hypnagogic Jerk thinks a country to have, or that are traditionally associated with Quebec. But of course Canada has uniquely Canadian culture; shit, the country’s obsession with hockey has literally filled books.
What Canada definitely doesn’t have a set, fixed culture that we force people to adhere to. That’s true, and it’s a good thing; for one thing, again, only dead cultures and fascist countries need that. For another, what’s the point of culture if it doesn’t create itself organically? I say that part of Canada’s unique culture is its preoccupation with hockey, but if in 150 more years Canadians are more into laserball or whatever, fine; that will be our culture in the year 2170.
Canada’s multicultural policy as it ACTUALLY exists does not say Canada has no national culture - that’s not what any policy says. The supreme word on the matter is the Constitution, which says in section 27 of the Charter:
This isn’t a statement of having no culture. It is a statement that simply recognizes the reality that the country has people from many cultures. It is, in other words, a realistic appreciation of the situation we’re in; we are stuck with each other and that’s just how it has to be. Bilingualism is EXACTLY the same appreciation; the reality is that Canada has two major languages and there is no practical solution otherwise so we might as well accept it.
I’ll respond to the other criticisms later, but this claim by @RickJay is manifestly false. Just Google “Canada post-national country” and see all the hits you get. This piece from The Grauniad was the first result; it quotes Justin Trudeau as saying that Canada could be the “first post-national state”, and that “[t]here is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada.” The piece adds that “[t]o Canadians, in contrast, the remark was unexceptional.” I mean, I expect Trudeau to say such things, but I think it’s a very radical idea and I disagree with it. How about you, do you think it’s an unexceptional remark, @RickJay? This review of a book by historian Jack Granatstein is even more direct about it, claiming part of Granatstein’s argument is that “[p]erhaps the greatest problem with multiculturally massaged history is that it spreads the idea among immigrants-and also among francophones in Quebec-that Canada has no national culture.” Maybe it’s just the fact that I’m a francophone in Quebec that makes me believe this, but heck, it sure shows that I’m not the only one to believe that a large part of the modern Canadian identity is this idea that Canada has no national culture, or is the first post-national state, and that this is a good thing.
It is a good thing to be open to other cultures and generally tolerant of their language, beliefs and delicious food. This does not always play out so well in practice. Residential schools showed disrespect and intolerance. Ontario’s consideration of sharia law perhaps gave too much consideration to culture at the expense of Canadian values.
Growing up, we would spend summer vacations camping and canoeing at various provincial parks. Eating bacon and fried bread or s’mores by the campfire. I spent thousands of hours playing open games of road hockey on the crescent with dozens of different kids. I looked forward to watching Wayne & Shuster or SCTV or Kids In The Hall. So did my buddies. My parents were genuinely tolerant of others and passed these values to their children. But multicultarism is a subset of Canadian culture. A few practices are antagonistic to Canadian norms. Multiculti has nothing to say about camping and road hockey, which exist in its absence.
Home of the beaver. Place where the wild moose wanders at will.
Though, in fairness to @RickJay, I should add that the idea that Canada should be a post-national country with no national culture, Canadian identity existing mostly as a scaffolding holding up the various identities of Canadians, also coexists in opposition with more nationalist views of Canada. I was struck by this article by Konrad Yakabuski (also a op-ed writer for Le Devoir) in The Globe and Mail about Quebecers supporting the Toronto Raptors in the 2019 NBA playoffs. You can feel the yearning by some Canadians for a thread that unites every Canadian, whether it is supporting “Canada’s team” in the playoffs or something else.
As for me, the only sport I follow is Formula One.
Trudeau is saying it is okay if other Canadians had cherished childhood touchstones other than road hockey and canoeing. Granatstein believes there is a Canadian culture. It should not be minimized or oversimplified through disregard of what occurred - often for legal, practical and traditional reasons. Such as the respect given to French not given to other non-English languages.
Not only that, but the implementation was left to the provinces. As a result, the Canada Health Act is a small document. If I recall correctly, it started as a six page document, and is now something like 23 pages.
I appreciate both answers, @Northern_Piper. I believe the political observer’s answer is more important, as the lawyer’s answer is interpreted by the courts, and the courts, while they are not as politicized as in the US, are subject to the context in which they exist, which isn’t insulated from politics. Francophones outside Quebec are largely counting on the courts to protect their linguistic rights, for example in terms of access to schools in their language, but the courts aren’t always going to rule in their favour, especially in the absence of any political will.
Does it? I thought (as per constitutional law expert and former Quebec cabinet minister Benoît Pelletier) that one of the problems facing francophones outside Quebec is that the courts consider English in Quebec and French outside Quebec as existing in symmetrical situations, which is not the case in reality but essentially forces the Quebec government to argue with the anglophone provinces against French-language education rights, because any gains by francophones outside Quebec will also be applied to Quebec anglophones.
That’s an interesting thing to know.
As I’ve said in another message, the demographic weight of Quebec is going down, so that’s not going to be true forever.
You mean O’Leary. (Erin O’Toole’s French is perfectly fine.) That, of course, is a consequence of the Conservative Party’s internal rules, which as you point out are based on constituency. But the Conservatives could very well decide to move in a more populist direction. They chose not to this time, but it’ll be up to them to decide what is the best way for them to get back in power.
If we want to answer the question, “Could Trump happen in Canada?” (and let’s focus on a right-wing populist leader for now, but we should also think of what a left-wing populist or authoritarian leader, which @Sam_Stone suggests could also happen, would look like in Canada), we do have to wonder whether the Conservatives could do better with a unilingual, populist, leader.
It’s unexceptional in the sense that meaningless comments from politicians are unexceptional. What a politician says in a structured, political speech is not what the people of a country actually think. Hell, Justin Trudeau does not literally think Canada has no core identity; that doesn’t even make any sense when it’s taken out of context, which I have no doubt it has been.
As I’ve probably said a dozen times over the years, you are mistaking the rejection of rigid, 19th-century views of national identity - the ol’ trifecta of dress, dance and dining - with the idea of having no national identity at all. That’s exactly as wrong as if a person in France in 1800 were to say the French had lost their sense of national identity because they identified with a nationality now instead of with a King assigned by divine right - a concept that, by the way, was exactly as hard for conservatives to accept then as multiculturalism is for them now.
Well, the Reform Party tried that to no avail. The unquestioned fact of the matter is that giving up on almost a quarter of the seats in the House of Commons puts a party at an absolutely monstrous disadvantage. It’s mathematically possible, but even just grabbing 5, 10, 15 seats in Quebec can means the difference between victory and failure, and many English Canadians find the idea of a unilingual leader suspicious; I know I and most people I know would think “wait, what? S/he doesn’t know French? They couldn’t find someone better? This guy can’t hire a tutor? WTF is with that?” Anything’s possible, but it seems to be that a true potential populist dictator is likelier to attain power if he can appeal to Quebec voters. It’s not like ignoring PEI.
This is very interesting. And I wonder what the threshold is. A Spanish speaker may be able to speak functional English, but having to defend oneself in court is something else. (Of course, I wouldn’t dream of defending myself in court without a lawyer, but you get my point.) I’m sure you’ve noticed as you were learning French that even being conversational, there were things that you had trouble expressing or understanding. So you know that speaking a language isn’t binary.
It seems to me that (not legally, but in the minds of many Canadians) bilingualism is getting into this zone, where it’s seen as something that exists because many francophones still don’t speak English. Of course, I disagree that my right to be served by my government in French should depend on my not understanding English, but even if it did, language skills aren’t binary.
From what I’ve heard of the debate over bilingualism in New Brunswick, the anglophone parties in favour of “language fairness” like the People’s Alliance believe some workers (I think it might have been ambulance workers that made the news) shouldn’t be required to be bilingual, because they’re unlikely to have to serve people who don’t speak English. But they seem to have a very binary view of what “speaking English” entails, especially in the case of medical emergencies.
The US has no official language, as many (often progressive) Americans like to say, but I’m not sure how they manage to square this with the fact that pretty much all official business operates in English, so English really is the de facto official language. However, some states may have other official languages.
I thought New Mexico actually had both English and Spanish as official languages, but I just checked and this claims that “[t]here is no official language for the state of New Mexico; the majority of the speakers living in the state speak Spanish, whereas the law does not permit Spanish in the legislature, and thus cannot be considered a bilingual state”, which surprises me. Anyway, as I understand both English and French were official languages of Louisiana before Reconstruction, and also both Spanish and English are official languages of Puerto Rico. (Yes, for now that’s not a state.)
A country doesn’t need an official language unless there is a reason to have one. The whole point of having an official language is that there is some practical reason why the use of one or more languages must actually be prescribed in law. Why would the USA need an official language?
The reason progressives in the USA keep saying the USA doesn’t have an official language is because that is an important thing to say. Remember, it’s popular among conservatives to bitch and whine if the government chooses to offer any sort of service or accommodation of any kind in any language other than English, ever, to which it can be answered that there isn’t any rule that every service must always be in English.
Many states passed “English is our official language” laws in the last 30-40 years and in more cases it was Republicans trying to make the point that “fuck Spanish and all the other brown people languages.” There is really no reason at all why Georgia or Mississippi needed to remind anyone they are English-speaking places. Those laws are pointless. In fact, many are totally pointless; here is the text of the Georgia law, and as you can see, it clearly had no effect at all on anything and nothing whatsoever would be different had it never been passed. It basically says “You need to use English, unless you don’t, or you can’t, or it’s not a good idea.”
http://www.languagepolicy.net/archives/ga.htm
However, a few states and territories - the ones you would expect - recognize English as an official language as part of laws that also recognize one or more native languages as having an official status, and Louisiana gives special status to French.
Quite so.
Definitely not for everyone: I am tolerant that other people are different, but I don’t consider myself as supporting multiculturalism. Look, it’s clear that you and I don’t agree about what multiculturalism means. To me multiculturalism is something much stronger. It’s definitely at odds with, for example, French republicanism, in which all citizens are assumed to have the same rights and the same duties. See Emmanuel Macron claiming that “[t]here is only one community in France, the national community.” Even if you disagree that multiculturalism has this stronger meaning, I’m sure you’ve heard it. I mean, why would there be so much talk about some countries (even Britain, even Germany) “getting away” from multiculturalism? They (as well as France) are still “tolerant that other people are different”.
I am. At least in the private sphere. But what about wearing symbols representing an ideology (such as a turban) when you’re holding the power of the state, for example, when you’re a policeman? I’m pretty sure we have different views on whether it should be acceptable, but we both “are cool with” the existence of diversity in the country.
And you seem to be starting to refer to me as a conservative. I’m not any more conservative than you; we’re both essentially centrists. But I think that being bilingual, looking at Quebec, Canada, the US, France, etc., I’m exposed to ideas that you aren’t.
How is this at odds with people having different cultures? Does Canada expect the Muslim and the Jew to have different rights and duties? Why would they?