It Is Time for Creative Constitutional Thinking on Bilingualism and Quebec’s Place in Canada

There was great resentment at that time of the supposed inconvenience of bilingual packaging, to the point that Trudeau replied at a public meeting in Alberta to someone complaining about it being burdensome to read French wording on his breakfast cereal box: “Why don’t you turn the box around?” There was also considerable resistance to what amounted to a federal response to Quebec separatist blackmail of deluging that province with money collected elsewhere in Canada.

The high separatist votes in Quebec referenda and the comparative strength of separatist parties in that province, along with the continuous oppression of the English language within Quebec by provincial governments, have dampened English Canadian enthusiasm for bilingualism. The official position of the Quebec government, that it effectively opposes bilingualism, does not present those Canadians where little French is spoken with an inspiring patriotic motivation to go to the considerable trouble of learning another language for the sake of fellow citizens who speak that language—and seem not to care whether they do or not. In these circumstances, the results of this latest poll are comparatively encouraging.

Quebec has managed its affairs very intelligently and with an efficiency that other provinces, particularly Ontario and British Columbia, could well emulate. As a result, Quebec is no longer really a below-average per capita income province, and the federalist argument against the secession of Quebec of the withdrawal of large transfer payments will no longer be as persuasive an argument as it has been.

However, because of the cultural revolution in Quebec that secularized the province and so de-emphasized the role of the Roman Catholic church (to which, whatever else it might have done, Quebec owes the preservation of its language, culture, and reasonable standards of health care and social services), the province’s birth rate has collapsed. In order to maintain a relevantly sizable percentage of the population of Canada as a whole, Quebec has had to champion immigration from more or less French-speaking people from such places as Lebanon, Morocco, and Haiti. These people, with the rarest exceptions, do not have the slightest interest in Quebec nationalism, and believe that they are becoming residents of a mainly English-speaking continent where they are pleased to find some fellow francophones.

Logically, no sane person would prefer to be unilingual than bilingual. No person of any cultural attainments at all disdains the French language and civilization. While the latest poll numbers are not objectively encouraging to the cause of biculturalism, when examined in context, they justify qualified optimism.

If Quebec, despite the reduction of the economic argument in favour of federalism, recognizes that Canada is indeed a benefit to Quebec, and the pleasures of being a citizen of a G7 country (and one whose federal government has been led by a Quebecer for 45 of the last 56 years) are at least as great as a unilingual country of about 7 million people who would suffer the departure at the dawn of their independence of a large number of skilled Anglophones and bicultural francophones, there would be every reason to believe that English-speaking Canadians outside Quebec could more easily grasp the desirability and value of pursuing some level of bilingualism.

Canada is inching slowly towards some sort of a determination of these issues. It is intolerable for the Quebec government to purport to banish the English language from federal outlets within the province, such as the post office, and federally chartered corporations, such as the banks. An independent Quebec would be viable, and certainly so would Canada without Quebec. But Quebec will prosper better with no diminution of its influence over the affairs in a renovated version of the present constitutional arrangements, which ensure its great influence within Canada. And Canada is undoubtedly enriched  by the presence within it of the second most important French population in the world.

We are close to the time when creative constitutional thinking, such as the program with which Pierre Trudeau defeated the separatists and set them back more than 50 years, and which Brian Mulroney almost brought to fruition with the Meech Lake agreement, could succeed.

Canada is the only transcontinental, bicultural, parliamentary confederation in the history of the world, and as a political system, it has endured longer than the comparable institutions of any other large country, except those of the United Kingdom and the United States. If 83 percent of Quebecers and 43 percent of Canadians outside Quebec approve of bilingualism, it is time to renew the Canadian federal system and to enlist Quebec entirely within it.