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A majority of Canadians outside Quebec no longer view bilingualism as an ideal worth defending. According to a poll conducted earlier this year, a mere 35 per cent held a positive view of official bilingualism. A similar percentage thought that bilingualism was at the heart of the Canadian identity. More worrying, only 19 per cent thought it very important (and 24 per cent somewhat important) that Canada remained an officially bilingual country.

This negative perception should come as no surprise. Canada’s version of bilingualism is increasingly divorced from reality. The cause of promoting Canadian bilingualism would be better served if it were couched in Swiss-like terms, ensuring safe spaces for the nation’s two languages. The good news is that Canada is de facto moving in that direction, although it is not politically acceptable to say this so openly.

Official bilingualism can only do so much

Official bilingualism cannot arrest the decline of French outside Quebec, nor should we expect it to.

Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s vision of bilingualism, embodied in the Official Languages Act of 1969, was a response to the needs of the time. The message, specifically to Quebecois threatening to secede, was clear: all of Canada is yours; your right to use and to educate your children in French is henceforth protected across the land. The act marked a bold break with the past, hopefully repairing the sad legacy of a century of anti-French laws outside Quebec.

And it worked. The 1980 referendum on Quebec’s independence was soundly defeated. Canada was henceforth to be (and to be seen as) a bilingual nation, with bilingualism a fundamental Canadian value, and francophones and anglophones being guaranteed equal rights A mari usque ad mare.

However, we now know that this noble vision of bilingualism failed to stop the decline of French, notably outside Quebec; but then, this was not the act’s initial intent.

The figures are well-known. According to the 2021 census, French is the mother tongue of only 3.2 per cent of Canadians outside Quebec. For the language spoken at home, the percentage drops to 1.9, which tells us that some 40 per cent of francophones in the rest of Canada no longer speak their language in their own home, a predictor of further decline.

The amendment to the Official Languages Act, passed in May 2023, bravely recognizes the growing imbalance between Canada’s two official languages. As I have noted previously, the updated act says all the right things, declaring that French, and not English, is the threatened language needing special protection. It even formally recognizes Quebec’s Charter of the French Language (Bill 101), which enshrines French as the province’s official language, arguably the boldest and most controversial departure from Trudeau orthodoxy. Bill C-13 also takes a timid step towards the territorialization of language rights, introducing the formal notion of regions with a strong francophone presence outside Quebec, or RSFPs, where the right to work in French in federally regulated businesses is to be protected.

In another previous article, I made a number of suggestions for strengthening C-13 – if the goal was to halt the decline of French outside Quebec. I admit to being naive. In a nutshell, the DNA of the 1969 act, with its focus on equal rights, prevents C-13 from going further to protect French. I doubt that any federal government, no matter how well-intentioned, could do more.

Simply put, federal policy can seek to better protect the right to work (or be served) in French, but it cannot impose French in the workplace as Quebec’s Bill 101 does; that would mean depriving Canadians of their equal right to work in English. But even in the unthinkable scenario that federal legislation would impose French in RSFPs, federally regulated businesses account for only a small fraction of the local workforces outside Ottawa.

The outcome is a foregone conclusion. Quebec will remain 80 per cent French (give or take), buttressed by provincial legislation, while French will gradually disappear in most of the rest of the country.

Language consolidation is the natural order of things

Nations like Switzerland, Belgium, and Finland have tied linguistic rights, notably schooling, to location to prevent such linguistic confrontations where the stronger language ends up assimilating the weaker one. The focus is on ensuring safe spaces for language communities, with bilingualism essentially limited to the symbols of the state and dealings with the national government.

The decline of the weaker language is a simple matter of arithmetic. With the notable exception of Acadian communities in New Brunswick where francophones account for 80 per cent or more of the population in certain areas, francophones are losing their language across the rest of Canada.

Marriage is often the vehicle of assimilation via the language spoken at home, transmitted to the next generation. The probability of finding a spouse with the same mother tongue (French, in this case) is basically a function of the weight of same-language speakers in the local population, with that probability dropping as that share falls. In addition, we may factor in the low probability that the spouse speaks one’s language at all. Outside Quebec, only 7.4 per cent of anglophones understand French, compared to 85 per cent of francophones who speak English. It’s easy to guess who wins when the two meet.

French will undoubtedly survive in Acadian strongholds and language islands like Hearst, in Northern Ontario. But these are often declining hinterland communities, which explains in part why French survives. In no major urban center outside Quebec, including ones with significant francophone populations (like Sudbury, Ottawa, or Moncton), have francophones been able to avoid assimilation. Even in the latter, Acadie’s cultural centre and only city with a fully French university outside Quebec, a third of francophones no longer use their language at home.

Promoting francophone immigration – arguably the federal government’s most powerful tool – can give a temporary, welcome boost to local francophone communities, but it cannot alter the underlying drivers of assimilation. Immigrants end up copying the behaviour of natives.

The rise of English drives linguistic separation

Managing the relationship between Canada’s two languages would be much simpler if one of the two was not English. The rise of English as the world language, further fuelled by the arrival of the internet, is accelerating Canada’s language split. Outside Quebec, it further amplifies the pull of English, while in Quebec the unstoppable attraction of English has led the Quebec government to strengthen language laws, although not always very tactfully,  Bill 96 being the most recent example of that policy.

Here we come to a paradox of Canada’s unique language dynamics. The stronger English grows, the more Quebec will feel justified in strengthening restrictions on the use of English. Imagine – God forbid! –  if the 2026 census were to show that French continues to lose ground in Quebec; we can already hear the calls for tighter restrictions.

On the judicial end, the stronger English grows, the more the courts, we can equally predict, will be inclined to look kindly on Quebec’s language legislation, even setting aside Quebec’s invocation of the notwithstanding clause. The predicable result: a province of Quebec where French is increasingly protected by law and the rest of Canada, with the hopeful exception of New Brunswick, de facto unilingual English.

Linguistic separation is good for national unity

The ultimate paradox is that linguistic separation is the best antidote to political separation. Why secede if Canada promises Quebec linguistic and cultural security?

Most Quebecois, I suggest, today view the near disappearance of French in the rest of Canada as a fact, regrettable of course, but with little bearing on their attachment – or unattachment – to Canada. What matters to them is the defence of French in Quebec. The sense of a shared destiny with francophones outside Quebec is disappearing, with the abandonment of the shared identity “French Canadian” in favour of “Québécois” being the final step.

West of Ottawa, the rest of the country has increasingly come to view the legislative reinforcement of French in Quebec with indifference. The most vocal opposition to Quebec’s invocation of the notwithstanding clause for Bill 96 and the inclusion of Bill 101 in the amended Official Languages Act came, understandably, from advocacy groups  of Quebec’s anglophone minority, not from the ROC.

Yet, totally abandoning Canada’s rights-based model of bilingualism is neither possible nor desirable. We cannot ignore Canada’s history of dispersed settlement which, unlike in Europe, means that language minority communities are spread across the country. Federally funded minority communities and associations also are a politically established fact, children of the original 1969 act, and will continue to advocate for minority language rights, and rightly so.

The challenge for a future bilingual Canada is where to put the emphasis in public discourse. Why not state openly that the primary objective is not to make all of Canada bilingual (and, for example, “force” Albertans to learn French), but to ensure that each of the nation’s two language communities has safe spaces where they can grow?

I see Canada moving to a hybrid model which, like the Swiss confederation, recognizes the prerogative of constituent members to give primacy to one language (Italian in the Canton of Ticino, for example), but also retains elements of an individual rights-based model, specifically guaranteeing continued access to education for minority language populations.

Under such a model, New Brunswick might consider giving French priority in municipalities where Acadians are a clear majority, but here, I’m undoubtedly dreaming.