Official bilingualism: from failure to farce
National Post – April 21, 2010
By Lorne Gunter

It used to be called the "bilingual belt," a narrow strip of Canada with its western anchor in Ottawa, following the St. Lawrence River through Montreal and Quebec City and ending in northern and eastern New Brunswick.

When the first Trudeau government passed the Official Languages Act in 1969, nearly all fluently bilingual Canadians lived along this ribbon of land. They still do. Four decades of linguistic tinkering by the federal government at a cost of several billion dollars has accomplished very little in terms of turning Canadians into two-language communicators.

Official bilingualism may have succeeded in getting more federal services provided in both French and English, but it has not moved the needle more than a few notches in making individual Canadians personally bilingual. Thirty-five percent of Canadians may speak two languages, but more than half of these speak French or English and another non-official language, such as Mandarin or Punjabi.

Just 17% of Canadians claim to be bilingual French-English, and that percentage is widely believed to be inflated since language skills are self-reported on the census. No one comes to your home to test your competence. Statistics Canada merely takes your word for it.

To illustrate how little personal bilingualism has penetrated ordinary Canadian society, consider that in Ontario 97% of workers claim to use English nearly all the time at work. That is down from 98% when the Official Languages Act (OLA) was passed and that includes the tens of thousands of federal workers in the nation's capital whose jobs demand two-language proficiency.

Even in Manitoba, which has the largest francophone population outside the bilingual belt, the rate is 97.2%.

The biggest change in the past 40 years has been in Quebec, where the percentage of employees using English "most often" at work has dropped from nearly one-quarter to just over 17%. But even those numbers mask the fact that 23.2% of Quebec workers still admit to using English "regularly."

Nearly 95% of Quebecers speak French, but only 42% speak English.

That's considerable though, compared with the rest of Canada, where 97.6% speak English, but only about 10% speak French.

The point of all of this is twofold. First, it tells us that all of the effort and all of the money spent by Ottawa over the past four decades – the court fights to win minority-language schools, the erection of bilingual signs on every patronage project, the regulation of consumer products, the subsidization of culture – has accomplished nothing except the production of a bilingual federal workforce (something that could have been created more simply, and at far smaller expense, merely by altering existing hiring guidelines).

All other advances in personal bilingualism can probably be attributed to social evolution. We travel more and technology brings us into contact with people who used to be too distant to communicate with. Beyond the public service, most gains in personal bilingualism likely would have occurred without the OLA.

The other reason for reciting all these facts is to despair for the future of our democracy if a private member's bill that already has cleared the House of Commons also manages to pass the Senate.

Bill C-232, introduced by New Brunswick NDP MP Yvon Godin, would require all future Supreme Court nominees to be able to hear cases in French or English without the aid of official translators. All three opposition parties voted in favour of this distortion of reason, democracy and unity; only the Tories opposed it.

If Mr. Godin's bill becomes Canadian law, in future very few justices will come from anywhere other than the bilingual belt. While the object of the bill may be some symbolic embodiment of our two-language principle, the practical impact will be to give bilingual francophones an influence over the Charter and courts out of all proportion to their percentage of the national population.

The bill would also rank language above legal knowledge as a criterion for the court. A brilliant civil law expert who spoke only French? No chance. A human rights specialist who was only unilingual English? Nope.

Our legal fates will be in the hands of people whose first qualification for their job is their ability to interpret legalese in both official languages.

And just wait for the happy reaction of Westerners when their next constitutional challenge is rejected by a Quebec-majority court because no British Columbian or Albertan qualified.

This is a disastrous bill. And it's shocking that it is so close to becoming law.