Official Bilingualism Has Failed Canada

Re-printed without permission.

Why Ottawa’s language regime is a barrier to merit, representation and democratic fairness

By J.J. McCullough

https://macleans.ca/politics/official-bilingualism-has-failed-canada/

n April 26, 2025, 11 people were killed when a deranged man plowed his SUV through a crowd at Vancouver’s Lapu-Lapu Day festival. The next morning, Prime Minister Carney spoke movingly of the tragedy, characterizing it not just as an attack on individuals, but the Filipino community itself. Yet his words of grief came not in Tagalog, the language most Filipino-Canadians speak, but English.

And French.

“Une enquête est en cours pour déterminer comment et pourquoi cela s’est produit,” he told the grieving Filipinos, lapsing into a language 25 million Canadians cannot understand but have learned to accept as a fact of life in statements from representatives of their government. “Les autorités ont confirmé qu’une personne est détenue. On pense qu’il a agi seul.”

Most Filipino-Canadians know English, like 87 per cent of Canadians overall. Linguistic minorities in the country, whether their first language is Khmer, Polish or Xitsonga, have long accepted English as a necessary tool of communication in a diverse country—the bridge language that the vast majority of Canadians, regardless of personal background, will use in most public contexts for reasons of efficiency and expediency. It is only French-Canadians, however, who are understood to possess a unique right, endorsed by the constitution and defended by a phalanx of politicians, journalists, activists and intellectuals, to be addressed by the state (and increasingly the private sector) in the language they prefer. Some Canadian, somewhere, might have preferred to hear Carney mourn the Lapu-Lapu Day tragedy in French. So the Prime Minister obliged.

Why exactly only one linguistic minority in a country as large and multicultural as Canada enjoys a right to things in their preferred language is difficult to answer using liberal or utilitarian logic. Official bilingualism nevertheless remains venerated by all manner of Canadian elites as a taboo in the truest sense; a sort of folk religion that’s upheld more than defended. Evidence continues to accumulate that state-mandated bilingualism conflicts with Canada’s self-image as a fair and merit-based democracy, and the worst may be yet to come. It’s a faith worth revisiting.

When confronted by some obviously absurd manifestation of the right to French in action—French schools in the Arctic, French CBC shows for Albertans, prime ministers speaking French to the Australian parliament, etc.—defenders of the status quo can rarely offer more than a blunt appeal to law. The Charter of Rights and Freedoms declares English and French the official languages of Canada and promises communications and services from the federal government will be offered in French. Press further as to why such language rights exist at all, and you’ll receive an equally blunt assertion that this is simply something Canada owes to one of its two founding peoples.

“Founding peoples” refers to the idea that Canada was settled and built by individuals from particular ethnocultural groups. But why do only two types of Canadian get to be founding peoples? It certainly doesn’t seem tied to any coherent theory of history.

Ontario and Quebec were carved from the former colony of New France and claim to be its legal successors. But even New France was not simply a society of French settlers and the Englishmen who eventually conquered them; Indigenous peoples, enslaved Africans and migrants from other parts of Europe were there as well. When Canada annexed the northwestern half of North America in the 19th century, waves of immigrants made the country even more diverse, with new provinces and territories built and settled by peoples from Eastern Europe, Asia and elsewhere, in addition to migrants from Canada’s east. Canada’s postwar growth into a country of 40 million has been driven by even more varied sources.

In no meaningful sense was Canada ever a nation of just two types of people. Even modern programs of using immigration to boost the country’s French-speaking population can’t help but expose the lie—it’s hard to argue, after all, that 21st-century migrants from Cameroon or Algeria deserve “founding nation” privileges, when, say, descendants of 19th-century Chinese railroad workers do not.

There’s not much to suggest official bilingualism was ever much about honouring founding nations anyway. It’s always been guided by a more pragmatic motive: weakening French-Canadian nationalism in Quebec by fostering a milder form of French-Canadian nationalism across the country. Quebec’s distinctness as the only province of Canada where French is the language of day-to-day life can foster a sense of alienation from the rest of the country. But if Canada’s national establishment was willing to embrace the French language and encourage French outside of Quebec, then presumably Canada would no longer be quite so alienating. In 1969, Ottawa passed the Official Languages Act, which declared English and French as the two official languages of Canada and required federal services to be available in both languages.

Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau, the leading theorist of all this, had a very Ottawa-Montreal-centric view of the country, and, perhaps predictably, one of the most observable consequences of official bilingualism in practice was keeping political power in the hands of men and women with backgrounds similar to his own: bilingual urban professionals from the Laurentian region (occasionally supplemented by the odd New Brunswicker).

This bilingual glass ceiling on political talent has warped Canadian democracy. Because French-speaking Canadians are not, in fact, distributed in any broadly even way across the country, Canada’s most powerful ministries tend to be dominated by the most fluently bilingual, which in practice means politicians born, raised, educated and employed in the limited parts of Canada where French is part of day-to-day life. It’s not a coincidence that over the last decade of Liberal rule, much power has been concentrated in the hands of white, bilingual central Canadians like Mélanie Joly, François-Philippe Champagne, Marc Miller, David McGuinty, David Lametti, Dominic LeBlanc and, for that matter, Justin Trudeau.

It’s possible to opt into this class—ambitious career politicians elected to parliament at college age have been known to successfully assimilate to Parliament Hill’s bilingual culture. Westerners Pierre Poilievre, Andrew Scheer and Jason Kenney, for instance, were all elected to the House of Commons in their 20s and are frequently held up as proof anyone can be bilingual. But that argument mistakes an exception for a rule. Language is ultimately a tool of communication. Linguistic science affirms it’s a skill that’s acquired in response to a person’s perceived need, and most Canadians simply don’t take jobs in their 20s that require them to communicate with French-speaking people every day.

Most of Canada’s premiers come from English-speaking places and have never needed to learn French. They therefore have no plausible path to the prime ministership and, since the Official Languages Act took effect, Canada’s executive branch has never been led by people with any experience being a head of government. Men and women who make successful careers in the private sector face similarly limited political prospects in a country whose government privileges what most Canadians consider a useless, exotic language over competence in business, science or academia.

The story is little different for the unelected parts of government. Ottawa continues to modernize the Official Languages Act—mostly recently in 2023—forever strengthening language obligations as more positions and offices are said to “require” bilingualism to operate. Almost all senior managers in departments with any sort of national jurisdiction are now required to be hyper-functional in both official languages “at the time of appointment”—a standard that weekend or evening classes with even the best French tutor can rarely meet. Much of the country is accordingly shut out from top jobs in the deep state.

The outcomes of all this grind uncomfortably against Canada’s modern goals of diversity, equity and inclusion. Review the heads of basically any senior federal institution, be it the courts, Crown Corporations, the military or some major regulatory board and you’ll find a Canadian elite that remains much whiter and much more Laurentian than the country it rules. Claims from the Canadian establishment that unilingual English speakers are simply lazy might get a pass when directed at rich white guys like Michael Rousseau, the defenestrated Air Canada CEO. They become much darker when the target is the country’s 23 per cent foreign-born population and their children, who’ve likely already struggled to learn English—a second language they’ll actually use.

The inescapable contradictions of trying to craft a French-speaking elite from a multicultural country can drift into the absurd. Governor General Mary May Simon, whose lack of fluency in French provoked a tidal wave of complaints to the Official Languages Commissioner, has attempted to blame her poor French on the Inuit day school she attended as a child—an odd argument that suggests one of the tragedies of Canada’s Indigenous education system was not enough teaching of European languages. When Thomas Cromwell retired from the Supreme Court in 2016, Prime Minister Trudeau was reported to have wanted to select a female bilingual judge of colour from the Maritimes to replace him—only to learn no such person existed.

More than 50 years after the passage of the Official Languages Act and 40 years after the Charter, official bilingualism has not failed as a policy as much as it’s failed Canada. And the cost has been tremendous—not just the literal cost of things like building Toronto a $126-million French-language university with just 25 students—but the opportunity cost of excluding so many of the country’s best and brightest from consequential careers in public or even private service, and the cultural cost of perpetuating a shibboleth that Canada is properly understood not as a salad bowl democracy, but a layered hierarchy of peoples, with hazily defined “founding nations” entitled to special rights.

Quebec nationalism, meanwhile, marches on unabated. The province keeps electing separatists and is in the process of unilaterally proclaiming a semi-autonomous constitution. But in its own way, Quebec’s language policies remain more grounded in the real world than Ottawa’s. The province rationally provides most public services exclusively in French because that’s the language the majority of people in the province speak. Indeed, the central paradox of Canadian bilingualism has always been that the province it was primarily intended to appease doesn’t accept it as a sensible policy within its own borders.

Defenders of the status quo like to claim Canada has a “French fact,” but the numbers suggest in much of the country it’s one small fact among many. To desire a Canada where one cultural fact is honoured above others—indeed, at the expense of others—is simply an arbitrary preference of taste and theory. The rest of us are allowed to prefer something else.

J.J. McCullough is a columnist and commentator based in B.C.