It’s a uniquely ridiculous Canadian story.
Two Canadian pilots were killed in a freak accident at LaGuardia airport and yet Canadian news coverage has been dominated by outrage over the fact that the CEO of the pilots’ airline, Michael Rousseau of Air Canada, released a condolence video that had French captions but no spoken French!
Though one of the two dead pilots was French Canadian, near as I can tell, none of the anger at Rousseau’s video is coming from anyone associated with the victims themselves, but rather the Canadian political class and punditocracy. Prime Minister Carney denounced the video for lacking “judgment” and “compassion,” and a bunch of other politicians have said similar things, particularly in Quebec, where the legislature passed a unanimous motion demanding Rousseau’s resignation. There have been a ton of angry anti-Rousseau editorials in all the leading Canadian papers.
It is obviously a highly performative, almost ritualistic, almost religious outrage occurring mostly so members of the Canadian establishment can collectively affirm one of their shibboleths: the country’s elite should be bilingual.
On social media, however, the reaction has been quite different, with ordinary Canadians expressing frustration and annoyance at the distasteful nature of it all. Two men are dead and this is what our betters are yapping about? An old debate — long stigmatized, but never successfully suppressed — has resurfaced: why are we doing this bilingualism thing at all?
I’ve been arguing against the Canadian elite’s cult of official bilingualism for a very long time. To the extent I have a controversial reputation in Canada and don’t get invited on things very much, it’s in large part because I’m very outspoken on this issue, which is often treated as the one line you’re not allowed to cross. Hating trans people or saying October 7 wasn’t so bad… those are edgy opinions that can be forgiven. Questioning bilingualism is a much more unforgivably toxic take, because it’s seen as offending Quebeckers, and a lot of elite Canada wants to be on Quebec’s good side.
But I also feel this is one issue where I’m very, very obviously in the right, and where I have the least self-doubt. There aren’t many issues where I feel I could hold my own in some Jubilee-style “Surrounded” debate bro type thing, but this is one.
So, with that being said, let me attempt to engage with some of the arguments you see made in favor of not just official bilingualism, but the idea of Canada requiring a bilingual ruling class in particular.
Canada is a bilingual country, so it makes sense for the Canadian government, and other Canadian national institutions, to provide nationwide services in both French and English.
Canada is a bilingual country by law, but not by fact. Canada is in fact an overwhelmingly English-speaking country. According to the 2021 census, 87% of Canadians can speak English while 11% can speak only French and about 2% can speak neither. Of this four million Canadians who can only speak French, 96% are located in the province of Quebec. Excluding Quebec, the rate of Canadians who can speak English rises to 97.8%.
It’s sensible for things in Quebec to function mostly in the French language, given about 94% of people in the province can speak it. It’s sensible for things outside of Quebec to operate mostly in English for the same reason. In both Quebec and the rest of Canada there is a very small minority of people, mostly in urban centers, who cannot speak the dominant language of where they live, so it’s reasonable for accommodations to be made for their needs on a case-by-case, community-by-community basis.
What is decidedly not reasonable, however, is to blindly organize all public (and in some cases, private) operations in this country as if there exists some substantial unilingual French-speaking minority everywhere from Newfoundland to Nunavut that is helpless without services specifically tailored to them — a minority in need of French-speaking receptionists and clerks and cops and teachers and librarians and journalists and guides and managers and lawyers and judges and HR departments and all the rest, all accessible at all times, anywhere in Canada.
For Canada’s service sector to go above and beyond in seeking to accommodate the needs of a unilingual French population in provinces and territories outside of Quebec that either barely exists or is substantially overshadowed by other linguistic minorities is to engage in a preposterous misallocation of resources simply to pay tribute to a bilingual fantasy version of Canada that’s never actually existed.
The French are one of the “two founding nations” of Canada and therefore should have their language granted official status across the country.
If Canada’s non-bilingual reality is conceded, it’s usually countered by a blunt normative assertion that an obligation to provide French services nationwide is some inherited right owed in perpetuity to the descendants of one of Canada’s “founding nations.” Even if French services are not needed in much of the country in a strictly functional sense because the number of unilingual French speakers does not justify them, French Canadians, as members of one of the “founding nations,” can claim a right to French everywhere simply on the basis of language preference. Such arguments featured prominently in a 2022 panel discussion I participated in on the Steve Paikin show.
What does it mean to be a “founding nation” of Canada? The term does not appear in the Canadian constitution. It does not appear in the Confederation debates. It is a narrative device employed to posit a certain theory of Canadian history that’s both flawed and dated. Indeed, the “two founding nations” theory is so at odds with the realities of both Canadian history and Canada’s modern form it cannot be used to justify public policy without inflicting enormous undemocratic harms upon the country.
What are now the provinces of Ontario and Quebec began life as a single French colony that was conquered by the English in 1760. In 1867 the constitution of the Dominion of Canada was written to unify the now-separated Ontario and Quebec with two other English colonies, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, as the first four provinces of a democratic federation. A clause was included allowing for the use of French in the union parliament, and there were protections for the education rights of “the Queen’s Roman Catholic Subjects.”
The 1867 compact was a pragmatic deal in which different provinces were given different things in exchange for their willingness to sign on. The English Canadian founders were certainly pleased with themselves for having secured the support of Quebec’s French Canadian political elite, but beyond the limited concessions to the French language and Catholicism, they did not enshrine any theories of culture (or as they would have conceptualized it at the time, “race”) into the document that established what Canada was.
As a purely demographic matter, Canada was hardly a nation of just two “peoples” in 1867. In addition to French and English Canadians, the four initial provinces were home to substantial populations of peoples from other European backgrounds, descendants of enslaved Africans, and indigenous North Americans. By 1871 the entire northwestern half of North America had been annexed by the Canadian state. It would subsequently be carved into four additional provinces and two territories and populated by millions of immigrants from across Europe and the wider world. Substantial numbers of Eastern Europeans famously migrated to the central Canadian prairies, while people from China, Japan, and India created sizeable communities on the pacific coast. Subsequent waves of 20th century immigration would proceed to make Canada one of the most multicultural nations on earth.
In short, in absolutely no sense has the construction of Canada into its modern form met any definition of a nation founded by and for only “two” types of person.
To presume that French Canadians (and for that matter English Canadians) possess inherent rights that derive from their cultural identities rather than their status as free individuals is a profoundly illiberal idea that frames Canada not as an egalitarian democracy, but a hierarchy of peoples, wherein one’s ancestral identity can override competing interests of Canadians of different backgrounds. Canadians, in fact, explicitly rejected enshrining these values into the Canadian constitution when they voted down the Charlottetown Accord in 1992, a package of amendments the aging Pierre Elliot Trudeau criticized as a project of turning Canada into a nation governed by “a hierarchy of categories of citizens.”
Diversity brings with it diversity of language, and Canada is home to a vast array of linguistic minorities. Over 800,000 Canadians told the 2021 census that they speak Punjabi either “regularly” or “most often” at home, with the Mandarin-speaking community roughly the same size. The next three largest groups — Spanish speakers, Arabic speakers, and Tagalog speakers — are about equally-sized to each other as well, comprising a combined total of nearly two million. The number of Canadians who speak French at home — seven million — entails the plurality of Canadians speaking something other than English, though the total number of people speaking what the census calls “non-official languages” outnumber French-speakers at 7,799,855.
It is difficult, in other words, to justify nationalizing “official” status for the French language purely on the basis of an appeal to the inherent rights of a linguistic minority, given linguistic minorities have long comprised a broad and diverse community of Canadians who exist in different proportions in different provinces (only 57,420 British Columbians claim French as their “mother tongue,” for instance, but over 417,000 claim Chinese). Yet that is what Canada did.
In 1969 the elder Trudeau’s administration passed the Official Languages Act, which heralded the dawn of “official bilingualism” in Canada, more than a century after Confederation. In 1982 Canada gained complete independence from Great Britain, and the two “official languages of Canada” were enshrined in the Canadian constitution for the first time. These late-20th century reforms made Canada a “bilingual” country in a legal sense, granting new constitutional rights to English and French-speaking Canadians in ways that are mostly only relevant for English speakers in Quebec or French-speakers in non-Quebec provinces. But as a matter of demographic reality, Canada remained and remains a diverse society built by a diverse array of people.
That not everyone has been awarded “language rights” for their contributions to the country, or even receives performative gestures of acknowledgment by elites (even Rousseau’s video began and ended with a route bonjour/merci), was a choice informed by the ideological assumptions and political calculations of Canadian politicians in the 1960s and 1980s more than an honest reckoning with Canadian realities. Their parochialism has not aged well.
Learning French is easy. There is no excuse for English Canadians to not become fluent in it.
Arguments that English Canadians are lazy, arrogant, etc, for not being fluent in French have been flying around in the aftermath of the Air Canada fracas, with CEO Rousseau held up as a quintessential case study of the stereotypically lazy Anglophone. Rousseau’s past promises to learn French have been dug up, and facts about his personal life that supposedly reveal the weakness of his excuses have been publicized (lives in Montreal! Has a French wife!). The Montreal Gazette published a whole little timeline chronicling his shame (“March 2022: Rousseau struggles through a committee hearing,” etc.)
Rousseau comes off as a pathetic figure. He has apologized for not speaking French in the video about the dead pilots, just as he has apologized many times in the past for his failure to gain fluency in a language he assures he’s been trying hard to learn through private tutors and classes (“Well, next time — if there is one — maybe try harder,” scoffed Raphaël Melançon in the Gazette).
Amid all this condemnation, in an otherwise hostile editorial in the Toronto Star, David Olive conceded there might be some perfectly benign, morally-neutral reasons why Rousseau, an Ontario businessman in his 60s, might not have become fluent in French during his five years running Air Canada in Montreal, while Prime Minister Carney, an Anglo from Alberta, has seen his French improve during his time in Ottawa:
Carney, now 61, has since become functionally fluent in French. His French improves every day because he speaks it publicly almost every day.
And that’s a partial explanation for Rousseau’s language deficiency. A new language is hard to master unless one uses it daily.
Carney has ample opportunity to speak French, and doesn’t miss a chance to do so, as in his speech at Davos and in addressing the Australian Parliament earlier this year.
By contrast, Rousseau seldom has occasion to speak French. The language of international civil aviation is English. Rousseau speaks English with his peers at other world airlines, with suppliers at home and abroad, and with global aviation consultants. Rousseau works in a cocoon of English.
Olive, of course, ultimately hand-waves all this away, quoting a different columnist who cited some other people who moved to Quebec and “learned French on the job.” Though the examples cited (the heads of the Montreal orchestra and Hydro-Québec) strike me as people somewhat less likely to find themselves in “a cocoon of English.”
Language is ultimately a tool of communication, and the “cocoons” we inhabit dictate what sorts of communication skills we develop, and just as importantly, what sorts of communication skills we’re likely to develop in the future. On this linguists agree: if a language is not perceived as necessary for any day-to-day communicative purpose, fluency is probably impossible. This is why languages tend to be learned fastest when the learner is in some situation where the need for communication is perceived as extremely pressing: a baby wanting to speak to his mother, a missionary looking to save souls, two people madly in love with each other, and so on.
As The New York Times noted in a review of language learning apps:
It sounds like an obvious observation, but the entire point of learning a language is to communicate with other people. You can learn as many words or sentences as you want, but until you’re able to have a conversation with another person, you’ll never be fluent. Or, according to the CEFR model [the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages, a gold-standard for measuring fluency], you won’t even be halfway there.
Most English Canadians do not need French to communicate with other people, mostly because they are extraordinarily unlikely to regularly encounter people in their day-to-day lives who are unilingual French speakers. This is why Canada’s French immersion education system has been such a notorious flop: English Canadian kids can spend hours a day getting lectured by teachers in French, but the second they go home — or even just leave the classroom — they return to a world of English that reminds them just how superfluous learning French is. It’s not unlike the immigrant parent who dreams of “raising bilingual children” by only speaking the old country’s language to them, only for the project to fall apart once the kids realize that mom and dad know English just fine.
We humans are selfish creatures, and our minds work in self-centered ways. Needs are perceived by the assessment of the individual, not some external party. I can tell you you’re hungry, but you won’t eat if you don’t agree. The enormous cognitive reprogramming of gaining fluency in a second language is not a skill likely to be acquired without the brain perceiving a need for a particular form of communication for which no alternative, be it linguistic or, increasingly, technological, exists.
Bilingualism boosters in Canada tend to hugely overstate the degree that appeasing the feelings of others, or being patriotic, or doing what the prime minister says, or being publicly shamed, or craving upward-mobility in the Canadian elite can function as a motivating “need” for language acquisition. Canadians most likely to be French-English bilingual continue to be those who were born or raised in Quebec, and to a lesser extent those who come from some other community in Canada, usually Ottawa, where French was necessary for day-to-day communication. This fact makes bilingualism mandates for specific jobs a bit of a backdoor affirmative-action program for Canadians who come from Quebec and other French-speaking regions, but that’s a discussion beyond the scope of this essay.
Most French Canadians know English. This proves English Canadians are uniquely lazy and arrogant in not learning French.
According to the World Economic Forum, English is overwhelmingly the world’s most popular second language to learn. Kim Namjoon from BTS and the Iranian foreign minister might not have much in common, but both understood their lives and careers would be improved by gaining fluency in a language with over 1.5 billion global speakers. Again, however, it’s important to recognize that “usefulness” is something perceived by the communication needs of the learner, not some external political ideology or public pressure.
English fluency is the gateway to communicating with the greatest number of people. It has emerged as the planet’s “bridge” language, what a Norwegian oil executive speaks to a Saudi prince when hammering out a deal. Learning English is a necessity for enjoying the cultural products of Hollywood, the world’s most prolific producer of entertainment, and for consuming the greatest amount of online content, half of which is written in English. Ask a young person in Buenos Aires or Jakarta why he’s so good at English and the answer is often “I grew up watching American movies,” or simply “the internet.”
There is nothing remarkable about the fact that English fluency is high among French Canadians (46% of Quebeckers are bilingual). English fluency is high in Croatia and Poland too. Knowledge of English is a common and rational response to inhabiting a world in which so much that is interesting and important — much of it originating or occurring outside of Canada altogether — is communicated in English.
It is unfair and arrogant, and a symbol of cultural chauvinism, colonialism, and imperialism to expect French Canadians to learn English.
The issue is not what people are “expected” to learn, but what they are actually learning, and, accordingly, how society and public policy should be structured in response to what people actually know.
People, after all can be told to learn all sorts of things. English Canadians have been told for decades that learning French will open up marvellous doors of opportunity to wealth and power, and yet they haven’t. French Canadians, by contrast, inhabit a political culture where English is often framed as a symbol of historic oppression and cultural erasure. Decades of Quebec administrations have intentionally erected roadblocks to make English education difficult. And yet English fluency rates among French Canadians remain high despite it all. Not Dutch high, but at least as good as, say, Greece.
Some French Canadian nationalists may interpret this as evidence that they just haven’t been fighting the Anglo hegemon stridently enough. The Quebec political class certainly enjoys characterizing language as a zero-sum game, in which the growth of one comes at the expense of another. But the prosaic explanation is that the popularity of English among the Quebec middle class has less to do with some grand nationalist drama than a concession to the practical — English is useful to know.
English Canadians have no reason to be proud or arrogant about this. To speak the world’s most useful language as your mother tongue is to win a cosmic lottery. It is, to use the fashionable term, a “privilege.”
Inherited privilege is a cause for modesty and humility. If you inherit wealth, you can attempt to create a more just and equitable society by giving some of it away to the less fortunate, but language doesn’t work this way. A native English speaker cannot sacrifice some of his English to others in the name of equality. And just as the wealthy man would never seek to create an equal society by preventing someone else from making money or emptying his wallet into the dumpster, so too is language equity not something that can be achieved by handicapping others or making sacrifices out of guilt.
The native English speaker who tries to learn a second language purely out of guilt or embarrassment will inevitably collide with someone who has learned English for their own personal betterment. This is the old cliché of the American tourist in Germany or wherever who awkwardly chokes out a “ich mochte bestellen machen…” only to be cut off in flawless English — “would you like to see the English menu?”
Communicating with someone who speaks your language as their second can be an annoying experience. English speakers generally have high tolerance for it just because the global ubiquity of English communication makes it an unavoidable fact of life. Speakers of other languages often have less patience for hearing their languages spoken poorly, in part because speakers of other languages are increasingly likely to be able to speak some English these days, and accordingly prefer to minimize slowness and confusion by just switching to the language where both parties will communicate better.
The only way to resist this state of affairs in Canada would be to create a system in which French Canadians are prevented from learning English and thus English Canadians have no alternative but to learn French in order to communicate with them. As I mentioned earlier, you can see elements of this in some of the language education policies of the Quebec government. Yet even the most authoritarian French language policies cannot counter the usefulness of speaking English in the eyes of the native French-speakers themselves.
This is not an outcome that results from the arrogance of English speakers. They are increasingly irrelevant to this calculation altogether.
English Canadians would never tolerate a CEO/politician/etc. who only spoke French, so why should French Canadians tolerate one who only speaks English?
It’s unclear if English Canadians would actually care all that much. English Canada certainly has no organized infrastructure of outrage capable of publicizing horror when the French language is used too much or at the purported expense of English. The closest would be the various lobby groups in Quebec set up to defend the “official” linguistic interests of English-speakers in that province. Yet most English Canadians outside Quebec neither know nor care about them — an encouraging testament to the degree ethnic appeals to Anglo solidarity have faded as any sort of rallying cry in 21st century Canada. English Quebeckers annoy many French Quebeckers for reasons that are comparable to the ways in which French Quebeckers often annoy English Canadians, and the degree English Quebeckers are imagined to represent mainstream English Canadian thinking and behavior has warped a lot of French Quebecker perceptions of the bilingualism debate outside their borders.
While one does occasionally encounter federalist French Canadian politicians in Ottawa who speak English poorly or barely — Justin Trudeau’s revenue minister, Diane Lebouthillier, comes to mind — the likelihood that a French Canadian in some position of national importance would have somehow never achieved basic English fluency is unlikely to the point where contemplating it becomes little more than a thought exercise about an alternative universe. But the true function of the question is to again wrongly reframe language learning as a matter of fairness and justice, rather than practical communicative necessity.
Could someone achieve a position of national importance in Canada speaking only Chinese? Unlikely (though it has happened), just because the majority of Canadians don’t speak Chinese and the rise to any job of national importance will have almost certainly required communication with members of Canada’s English-speaking majority. This is a linguistic barrier, and to the extent even the most common sense barriers can impose a disproportionate burden on certain individuals, it is unfair. In a society as large and diverse as Canada, however, outrage at unfairness is tempered by, as the constitution says, that which can be “demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.”
The great irony of all this is that French Quebeckers appreciate this utilitarian logic in the context of their own province. It is a consensus opinion among the Quebec political class that immigrants speaking Chinese or Arabic or Malay or whatever should learn French in order to function in an overwhelmingly French-speaking society. Some of this is justified chauvanistically, with Premier Legault framing non-French speaking immigrants as culturally “suicidal,” but much of it is clearly practical.
It is irritating and unproductive to be unable to communicate with your fellow man. An assumption that the fewer will adapt to the norms of the many remains the most reasonable method of accommodation anyone has devised to date.
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