FIRST PRINCIPLES
A weekly commentary by Link Byfield
January 3, 2008
Why not just scrap official bilingualism?
By Link Byfield
Newspapers before Christmas were dutifully reminding us that we have fallen short of a 2003 declaration by Stephane Dion, then a Chretien minister, that within ten years, half of all Canadian high school graduates should be bilingual.
“Informing” might be more accurate than "reminding." Did anyone pay attention to Dion’s compelling national objective five years ago? Yet here we are half-way to deadline, none the wiser, none the closer and all the poorer.
The reason we didn’t pay attention then, and aren’t likely to now, is that all the way back to Ottawa’s Laurendeau-Dunton commission 45 years ago, such grandiose bilingual goal-setting all sounds the same and all sounds absurd. We tune it out.
And for good reason. By any objective measure, official languages policy in Canada has been a colossally expensive flop.
We are no more bilingual than we were five years ago, we are less.
According to the Canadian census, 17.4% of Canadians claimed “knowledge of English and French” in 2006, down from the 17.7% who made the claim in 2001.
Until 2001 that percentage had been creeping up by half a percent or so with each five-year measure. Now, despite all the preaching, propaganda and spending, bilingualism is actually in retreat.
Curiously, nowhere have I been able to find this fact reported in the media since Statscan published its language tables on December 4. Nor can I find it in Official Languages Commissioner Graham Fraser’s subsequent tirade about federal neglect.
Instead we got a lot of trivia about “allophones” being more numerous than before, French being spoken less at home in Quebec, that bilingualism among anglo teens (15 to 19) has fallen from 16% to 13%, and that among mother-tongue francophones bilingualism is static, while still creeping upward among mother-tongue anglophones outside Quebec.
All of which means nothing. No one wrote the headline “Bilingual language skill falling in Canada.” Why not?
The problem, as I see it, is this: that Canadians have been taught for half a century to think that official bilingualism somehow unites the country. It doesn’t, but nobody in federal office dares say so, because too many jobs and votes would be lost.
The simple truth that bilingualism is a flop could be stated more easily at the provincial level. Unfortunately, the premiers treat it the same way Ottawa does: as a means of buying political support from special interest groups.
The worst example of this is Ontario, which under its French Services Act is now allowing municipalities bordering Quebec to force local businesses to post signs in both official languages. (For more on this civil rights atrocity, visit the recent archive entries of www.galganov.com)
It’s worth speculating what would have happened had Canada’s premiers united around Alberta’s Ernest Manning back in the 1960s and told Ottawa to stay out of provincial constitutional affairs such as language. Language rights had been retained by the provinces in 1867 for a good reason: so that Quebec could remain French, as it had been promised, and everyone else could remain English.
This might sound less biculturally chummy than many Canadians are now accustomed to, but the Pearson/Trudeau alternative we have been stuck with ever since – the idea that we will become a bilingual country -- is sheer fantasy. Why not expect all Canadians to play the piano? We are not a bilingual country, and never will be. We are a unilingual country with two bilingual provinces, Quebec and New Brunswick.
Nobody knows how much we have spent on this pipedream. Ottawa always says it spends only about $1 billion a year, give or take, which doesn’t sound like much. But let’s add in the provincial and municipal program burden across the country, plus the regulatory burden to Canadian businesses and professions of translation and extra effort. Toronto accountant Jim Allan pegged the total imposed cost at $16 billion in 2001, and the accumulated cost since 1969 at $772 billion.
Allan does not claim his calculation to be anything more than the best he can make given how little is actually published about the subject. It’s surely remarkable that none of our economic think-tanks has tackled so obvious a question. One suspects they might fear for their federal charitable registration. But a full and honest accounting is long, long overdue.
Where exactly Prime Minister Harper stands on bilingualism is anyone’s guess. He can’t confront the national delusion head-on, that’s certain. I assume that until English provinces start objecting to the cost, he has to maintain the pretense it’s saving the country.
- Link Byfield
Link Byfield is an Alberta senator-elect and chairman of the Citizens Centre. The Centre promotes the principles of personal freedom and responsible government.
A weekly commentary by Link Byfield
January 3, 2008
Why not just scrap official bilingualism?
By Link Byfield
Newspapers before Christmas were dutifully reminding us that we have fallen short of a 2003 declaration by Stephane Dion, then a Chretien minister, that within ten years, half of all Canadian high school graduates should be bilingual.
“Informing” might be more accurate than "reminding." Did anyone pay attention to Dion’s compelling national objective five years ago? Yet here we are half-way to deadline, none the wiser, none the closer and all the poorer.
The reason we didn’t pay attention then, and aren’t likely to now, is that all the way back to Ottawa’s Laurendeau-Dunton commission 45 years ago, such grandiose bilingual goal-setting all sounds the same and all sounds absurd. We tune it out.
And for good reason. By any objective measure, official languages policy in Canada has been a colossally expensive flop.
We are no more bilingual than we were five years ago, we are less.
According to the Canadian census, 17.4% of Canadians claimed “knowledge of English and French” in 2006, down from the 17.7% who made the claim in 2001.
Until 2001 that percentage had been creeping up by half a percent or so with each five-year measure. Now, despite all the preaching, propaganda and spending, bilingualism is actually in retreat.
Curiously, nowhere have I been able to find this fact reported in the media since Statscan published its language tables on December 4. Nor can I find it in Official Languages Commissioner Graham Fraser’s subsequent tirade about federal neglect.
Instead we got a lot of trivia about “allophones” being more numerous than before, French being spoken less at home in Quebec, that bilingualism among anglo teens (15 to 19) has fallen from 16% to 13%, and that among mother-tongue francophones bilingualism is static, while still creeping upward among mother-tongue anglophones outside Quebec.
All of which means nothing. No one wrote the headline “Bilingual language skill falling in Canada.” Why not?
The problem, as I see it, is this: that Canadians have been taught for half a century to think that official bilingualism somehow unites the country. It doesn’t, but nobody in federal office dares say so, because too many jobs and votes would be lost.
The simple truth that bilingualism is a flop could be stated more easily at the provincial level. Unfortunately, the premiers treat it the same way Ottawa does: as a means of buying political support from special interest groups.
The worst example of this is Ontario, which under its French Services Act is now allowing municipalities bordering Quebec to force local businesses to post signs in both official languages. (For more on this civil rights atrocity, visit the recent archive entries of www.galganov.com)
It’s worth speculating what would have happened had Canada’s premiers united around Alberta’s Ernest Manning back in the 1960s and told Ottawa to stay out of provincial constitutional affairs such as language. Language rights had been retained by the provinces in 1867 for a good reason: so that Quebec could remain French, as it had been promised, and everyone else could remain English.
This might sound less biculturally chummy than many Canadians are now accustomed to, but the Pearson/Trudeau alternative we have been stuck with ever since – the idea that we will become a bilingual country -- is sheer fantasy. Why not expect all Canadians to play the piano? We are not a bilingual country, and never will be. We are a unilingual country with two bilingual provinces, Quebec and New Brunswick.
Nobody knows how much we have spent on this pipedream. Ottawa always says it spends only about $1 billion a year, give or take, which doesn’t sound like much. But let’s add in the provincial and municipal program burden across the country, plus the regulatory burden to Canadian businesses and professions of translation and extra effort. Toronto accountant Jim Allan pegged the total imposed cost at $16 billion in 2001, and the accumulated cost since 1969 at $772 billion.
Allan does not claim his calculation to be anything more than the best he can make given how little is actually published about the subject. It’s surely remarkable that none of our economic think-tanks has tackled so obvious a question. One suspects they might fear for their federal charitable registration. But a full and honest accounting is long, long overdue.
Where exactly Prime Minister Harper stands on bilingualism is anyone’s guess. He can’t confront the national delusion head-on, that’s certain. I assume that until English provinces start objecting to the cost, he has to maintain the pretense it’s saving the country.
- Link Byfield
Link Byfield is an Alberta senator-elect and chairman of the Citizens Centre. The Centre promotes the principles of personal freedom and responsible government.
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