Barry Cooper National Post
CALGARY - On Wednesday in Ottawa the Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs, St�phane Dion, stood next to a beaming Prime Minister and announced that some serious spending would make the country more bilingual. A 35% increase in his dedicated bilingualism budget generated some impressive numbers. To the $570-million currently being spent each year, was added another $750-million in new and reallocated money. Over the life of the program, that amounts to about $3.6-billion, roughly the same as new spending for the military.
The money goes to minority-language schools, including kindergartens; to upgrading second-language classes; and to provide bilingual services in hospitals and courts. Because every decision of the federal government will require a language-impact statement, there is an additional regulatory burden as well.
According to Dion it's worth it. Certainly there is no question of pushing French down the throats of English-speakers. "On the contrary, it's Canadians who are pushing us in the back. They want more opportunities to learn their country's two official languages." He told CBC how his heart soared listening to cute little Chinese-Canadian kids in Richmond, B.C., chattering away in French.
The Prime Minister saw greater significance in the new spending. "The fact that we have two official languages," he said, "that we have people coming from all over the world and have found a way to live in peace in different languages, colours, and religion, and build a country that is an example to the world, it is part of the Canadian personality that we have to continue to build." Before being carried too far aloft on the wings of prime ministerial rhetoric concerning our ability to live peacefully in different colours, we should recall at least a few pertinent facts.
In comedy and politics, timing is everything. It was no coincidence that the announcement came the same day Quebec Premier Bernard Landry, coasting on a comfortable lead in the polls and with no intention of making separatism an issue, called a provincial election. Dion has long believed that every province should be officially bilingual, following the splendid example set by New Brunswick. If they were, he has said, "a lot of French-speaking Quebecers would encourage their own government to be even more open to the language minority of Quebec than is the case today." So the new bilingualism "action plan" is to encourage Quebec.
Consider the consequences of the last big push by the federal government in the direction of bilingualism, which was also supposed to encourage Quebec. In 1963, when Jean Chr�tien was still new to the House of Commons and official bilingualism was but a wild glitter in the eye of Pierre Trudeau, government "help" to language minorities was somehow seen as a way to fight terrorists in the FLQ as well as the more benign separatists and ordinary nationalists. A couple of years later the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism announced that the existing language policy was "the greatest crisis in Canadian history." Even more shocking, Canadians had no idea how bad the crisis was. By the end of the decade, Trudeau had passed the Official Languages Act; the constitutionalization of language rights arrived in 1982, bundled into the new Constitution.
Some astute analysts of the implications of the recommendations of the Bi-Bi Commission started calling it the Bye-Bye Commission. By drawing so much attention to Quebec and the language issue, the federal government had legitimized a limitless sense of grievance. Ottawa unawares had enhanced separatism. No matter how generous and understanding English-speaking Canada might be, these analysts said, it never could be enough. So: Bye-bye, Quebec. They were nearly right.
Remember what happened: In 1974, Bill 22 made French the sole official language in Quebec. It was followed by Bill 101; by acrimonious litigation; by the first use of Section 33, the "notwithstanding clause" of the Constitution; and by growing anglophone impatience. Terrorists firebombed a coffee shop in Montreal in the name of linguistic purity. Following the Canadian Grand Prix auto race, Jacques Villeneuve ran afoul of the law by naming his nightclub after his own nickname, "Newtown." The United Nations Human Rights Commission then got involved, objecting to the language police measuring the size of English and French letters on commercial signs. They thought Quebec had violated freedom of expression, which the UN was sworn to uphold. Such were the first poisonous fruits of government action on the bilingualism front.
At a time when productive, bilingual Quebecers are leaving that province in response to genuine markets for their talents elsewhere, when Canadians are centilingual, not bilingual, this "action plan" looks like the worst sort of retro-liberalism and special pleading by the federal government for more government interference. The last thing the country needs is to revive the government-generated mischief that Canadians were glad to be rid of a decade ago.
Barry Cooper is a professor of political science at the University of Calgary.
