Konrad Yababuski has written a must-read essay in the Globe and Mail on Canada, and bilingualism, which shows that it is in too many cases a failed policy. Bilingualism can only work when the two languages to be learned are considered equals and when it isn’t more valuable to learn one than the other or not to know it. In Canada, it is obvious that French is only indispensable in Québec and even then it is possible to survive without it on a short stay especially if one pretends not to be an English speaking Canadian. In the rest of Canada, French is so absent that one would never know except for the street signs written in both languages that Canada has a French speaking population. Jean Chrétien, the former Prime minister, used to state, mostly during times when Québec was deciding through a referendum whether to secede from Canada, that Canada without Québec isn’t Canada and that Quebec without Canada isn’t Québec, I believe that that the “language question” puts that affirmation in doubt. Sugary excerpt:
If English Canadians cared about learning French, they would. That is simply human nature. Around the world, everywhere, when people need and want to learn a language, they do. .
[…] If learning French is a luxury in English Canada, most people in Quebec consider learning English a necessity. Yet Quebeckers know they are playing with fire. You'd be hard-pressed to find a Quebecker who does not feel he or she has been personally and professionally enriched by learning English. But when census data show, as they did in December, that mother-tongue francophones now make up less than 50 per cent of the population on the Island of Montreal, and less than 80 per cent of Quebec's population for the first time since the 1930s, it gets a people thinking in survivalist terms. It gets a newspaper such as Le Devoir to write this headline: "Historic retreat of French in Quebec."
The issue gets framed — more or less — in these terms: Without a thriving francophone metropolis at its core, Quebec will be reduced before long to a Louisiana with sugar shacks.
Each of the solitudes maintains a tortured relationship with the language it doesn't speak first. English Canada needs the French fact to distinguish itself from the United States, but apparently not enough to become truly bilingual. Quebec needs to learn English to thrive in North America and avoid a retreat into isolation, but fears that each step out of its shell might deprive it from the option of going back.
