Every country has its fixations. Where else but in Canada could a straightforward debate about the who and when of French immersion in the third-smallest province send the whole country's official languages intelligentsia into a fit of doomsdayism? Watching the very real passion with which parents have reacted to New Brunswick's decision to end early immersion, it is hard not to think of what U.S. sex columnist Dan Savage said recently about his own nation's debilitating obsession. Not, race. The other one: religion. "Australia got the convicts. Canada got the French. We got the Puritans."
Mr. Savage evidently meant it as a compliment — to Canada and Australia. And though we should definitely take it as one, the "French fact" has — from Durham to Dumont — warped our national psyche, fed our collective neuroses and nearly torn us asunder. Four centuries after Champlain's arrival, we are no nearer, inside or outside Quebec, to reconciling ourselves to his linguistic legacy.
For English Canadians, the question is this: Do they really care enough about the other official language to learn it, not just for the purposes of properly pronouncing foie gras and salade niçoise on a holiday in Paris, but to understand, appreciate and grow closer to French-Canadian reality? The evidence is fairly conclusive that they don't. Despite the billions spent since the adoption of the Official Languages Act in 1969, the already derisory rates of bilingualism are falling in English Canada. Parents may pine for French immersion classes, but mostly for reasons that have nothing to do with bridging the solitudes.
Francophone Quebeckers have an equally ambivalent relationship with l'autre langue officielle. They are drawn to, yet repelled by it. A case in point: A couple of months ago, the Parti Québécois leader, Pauline Marois, suggested that history and geography should be taught in English in French public schools as part of a goal of making all Quebeckers bilingual by the time they finish their basic education. But when writer Victor-Lévy Beaulieu snapped back at her, warning greater English proficiency would set in motion the "slow genocide" of francophone Quebeckers, Ms. Marois took to the op-eds to proclaim "No to a bilingual Quebec."
The federal policy of official bilingualism was never meant to make Canada a bilingual country. Its primary objective has always been to ensure the protection and survival of the English-language minority in Quebec and the French-speaking minority outside its borders.
It's not working, particularly for francophones hors Québec, who are being assimilated before our very eyes. They now make up barely 4 per cent of Canadians outside Quebec; each new census tracks their decline. In Willow Bunch, Sask., where a francophone majority held the fort as lately as the mid-20th century, the number of people who speak French at home have dwindled to 30 souls, old ones at that, among a population of 300.
The federal public service, which should be a model of bilingualism, appears to be a hopeless cause. English-speaking employees regularly spend more time in language training than doing their jobs. They go off for months or years to get their "C" level bilingual status — the highest attainable — only to come back to work as functionally unilingual as before. Not that it really matters. Ottawa still works largely as it did before 1969: If there's an anglo in the room, the meeting is in English.
Though Ottawa has its hands full just trying to meet the basics of official bilingualism, it has occasionally dreamt bigger. In 2003, the Chrétien government adopted a five-year, $810-million plan that aimed, among other things, to make half of young Canadians bilingual by 2013. It is not working. Indeed, the bilingualism rate among anglophones between 15 and 19 — considered the "peak" rate for all cohorts — fell by a fifth to 13 per cent in the decade to 2006.
DISCONNECTION TO DAILY REALITY
