Sorry, I Don't Speak French: Confronting the Canadian Crisis That Won't Go Away

Graeme S. Mount is a professor of history at Laurentian University. He
is the author of Canada’s Enemies: Spies and Spying in the Peaceable
Kingdom, Chile and the Nazis, and The Diplomacy of War: The Case of
Korea.

Graham Fraser, Canada’s Commissioner of Official Languages, has
written this book as a wake-up call. Bilingualism is the glue that holds
Canada together, he believes, and without it, Canada will evolve into at
least two separate places. Far too few federal civil servants can
operate in both official languages, French-immersion schools are not
solving the problem, and the assumption that most Québécois can speak
English (a false assumption) appears as arrogance to French Canadians.
Fraser, a bilingual Anglo-Canadian who has been Quebec City
correspondent for major Canadian newspapers, is well qualified to write
on this topic.

He notes several dangers. The French-speaking parts of Quebec no longer
elect federalist candidates. High schools and universities in most of
Canada treat French as a foreign language, and most anglophone students
graduate without a command of the language. South of Parliament Hill,
there is little French. (He might have added that north of Parliament
Hill, there is little English.) Without support in Quebec, no party has
formed a majority government in Ottawa, and the outcome in Quebec
determines who governs in Ottawa. If people once thought that they could
leave government to Quebec lawyers until French-immersion students
became bilingual civil servants and politicians, the hope has
evaporated. “Our children are not very interested in running the
country, and many Canadians are tired of having Quebec lawyers do it,”
he laments.

Fraser knows the history of Canadian bilingualism well. Although he
wrote this book when Paul Martin was prime minister, its publication
could not be more timely. The Harper government believes in devolution
of power to provincial governments and an emasculated federal authority.
Provincial governments too often have succumbed to the tyranny of the
majority and been intolerant of minority language rights. That Canada
could divide along language lines, with few in one province feeling any
affinity with those in another, is a distinct possibility.
Simultaneously, globalization is eroding economic ties that bound
different parts of Canada together. Without either emotional or economic
ties, can a country survive?