It seems Canada's "linguist duality" needs a tune-up.
Or so thinks Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who recently dispatched former New Brunswick premier Bernard Lord on a cross-country tour to "review the state of bilingualism" in Canada.
Lord, of course, is perfect for this role. He is fluently bilingual, he's known as a "consensus builder" and he's a failed Conservative politician who could use the work.
Armed with these credentials, Lord will consult with minority language groups and produce a report which will likely recommend doling out money to minority language groups.
It's all pretty predictable.
A more interesting idea would have been to send Lord out on a cross-country tour to ask this question: Does anyone even care about Trudeau-style official bilingualism anymore?
Quebeckers, at least, would probably answer no.
After all, Quebec is actively promoting state-sanctioned unilingualism. In fact, thanks to its draconian language laws, enforced by draconian language police, English has the same status in Quebec as teddy bears named Muhammad have in the Sudan.
But what about the rest of Canada? Do Canadians outside of Quebec care about embracing the spirit of official bilingualism?
The statistics say no.
According to 2006 census information, about nine per cent of Canadian anglophones reported they could converse in both languages. Plus, if you consider only bilingual anglophones outside Quebec,that number falls to a little more than seven per cent.
And even that low figure probably overstates the case because the census question only asked respondents if they could speak French "well enough to conduct a conversation."
In other words, a lot of these "bilingual" anglophones would probably be hard pressed to continue a French conversation much beyond, "Bonjour, comment ca va?" or "Je fait du ski."
If anglo-Canadians cared about bilingualism, wouldn't it follow that more of them would make an effort to learn French, beyond what they were forced to learn in high school?
What's more, fewer young anglophones are learning to speak French. According to the report, the bilingualism rate for Canadians in the 15 to 19 age range has dropped from 16 to 13 per cent in the past 10 years.
And those young people who are bilingual seem to be losing the ability to speak French over time. In 2001, 14.7 per cent of anglophones aged 15 to 19 were bilingual. In 2006, however, only 12.2 per cent of that same cohort reported being bilingual.
Use it or lose it, indeed.
OK, I know it's sacrilege to suggest official bilingualism isn't working. But facts are facts.
The reality is that, outside of New Brunswick and parts of eastern Ontario, Canada is an overwhelmingly unilingual English-speaking country that includes a large French-speaking region, i.e. Quebec.
And here's another reality: a growing number of Canadians who are bilingual don't speak English and French, they speak English and Mandarin, or English and Portuguese, or English and Arabic, as a trip in any taxi cab will quickly prove.
Even the Liberal party seems to be paying only lip service to the bilingual ideal.
How else do you explain their picking Stephane Dion as leader, a man who speaks French and a language that only bears a slight resemblance to English?
So isn't it time we all stopped pretending Canada is a bilingual country? And more to the point, isn't it time government officials realized they are out of sync with Canadians?
Canadians care about fixing our health care system, the environment and national security. What they don't care about is a language policy developed in the 1960s. But try telling that to the Ottawa political establishment.
C'est impossible.
Gerry Nicholls is a senior fellow with the Democracy Institute. E-mail:
gerry_nicholls@hotmail.com.
