Jeffery Vacante: Mary Simon, Nick Suzuki and the burden of bilingualism
By Jeffery Vacante, Special to National Post, October 29, 2024
The language skills of Mary Simon are once again coming under scrutiny. Some in the French-language media in Quebec are expressing shock and outrage that Simon, who speaks English and Inuktitut, has so far failed to learn French more than three years after becoming Governor General. This most recent round of criticism comes two years after a number of Quebec nationalists, claiming that Simon’s appointment violated laws mandating bilingualism, filed a lawsuit against the federal government demanding Simon be removed from her position.
Leaving aside the outrageous colonial undertones of such condemnation — demanding the removal of Canada’s first Indigenous Governor General for her failure to acquire only one of the two settler languages imposed on her — these latest attacks on Simon follow similar criticism of Nick Suzuki, the captain of the Montreal Canadiens, for his failure to learn French after five years on the team, as well as of Michael Rousseau, the president of Air Canada, who was pilloried for his failure to learn French after living in Montreal for 14 years.
What these attacks show is an increasingly aggressive campaign on the part of certain nationalists in the province to make it socially unacceptable to live as a unilingual anglophone in Quebec. They also reflect a larger attempt of late to mandate bilingualism on more federal employees. The newly revised Official Languages Act, which imposes more French requirements on federally regulated companies as well as making companies that are located in Quebec subject to the province’s Charter of the French Language, also requires that certain federal positions, including those of deputy minister as well as Supreme Court justice, be held by individuals who are bilingual and who would not require the use of simultaneous translation services.
It should be kept in mind that this latest effort to require bilingualism for some positions at the federal level is taking place at the same time that the Quebec government has been working to remove requirements for bilingualism at the provincial level. The newly revised Charter of the French Language is written in such a way as to prevent the Quebec government from communicating with most Quebecers in a language other than French and also to ensure that private companies in the province cannot make bilingualism a condition for employment unless a compelling case can be made that such a requirement is necessary for the position.
Indeed, one of the main innovations of the new charter is the enlargement of the existing requirements that written communications in the civil service and in the private sector be in French to include oral communications. In making this change, the new law effectively removes any requirement that a person have any knowledge of English if that person wishes to live, work or do business in the province.
It is against this backdrop — the push to make French-language skills a requirement for employment in certain parts of the federal government as well as in federally regulated businesses in Quebec at the same time that any requirement for English at the provincial level in Quebec is being removed — that the media in the province has been raising the alarm about the limited language skills of Simon, Suzuki and Rousseau.
The unstated assumption of these recent nationalist calls for bilingualism, of course, is that such calls would be an imposition borne largely by unilingual anglophones. But it would be an imposition also borne by unilingual francophones who would find it increasingly difficult to find a place within the federal civil service as unilingual francophones.
For many nationalists, of course, this would be just fine. The more that the Charter of the French Language eliminates the need for bilingualism within the Quebec civil service and in the private sector, and the more that francophone Quebecers become unilingual as a result of such measures, the less welcome they will feel within an increasingly bilingual federal government. The result, ultimately, will be increased support for Quebec independence from this increasingly foreign federal government, which is to say a federal government that requires francophones to have some knowledge of English as a prerequisite for employment. The unilingual anglophone population in the rest of the country, meanwhile, would welcome Quebec’s renewed push for independence because Quebec’s departure from Canada would remove those bilingualism mandates that had kept them from securing good federal jobs that had been largely reserved for bilingual citizens.
Pierre Elliott Trudeau once noted, “Bilingualism is not an imposition on the citizens. The citizens can go on speaking one language or six languages, or no languages if they so choose. Bilingualism is an imposition on the state and not the citizens.” Under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s new Official Languages Act and Quebec Premier François Legault’s new Charter of the French Language, as well as within an environment increasingly shaped by shrill commentary from certain media outlets in Quebec, bilingualism is turning out to be a burden to be borne by English-speaking individuals like Mary Simon, Nick Suzuki and Michael Rousseau.
