<br><h2 class="entry-title"><a href="http://blogs.theprovince.com/2012/01/23/mark-milke-is-it-time-to-reconsider-official-bilingualism/" title="Mark Milke: Is it time to reconsider official bilingualism?" rel="bookmark">Mark Milke: Is it time to reconsider official bilingualism?</a></h2>
<p class="metadata">January 23, 2012. 2:36 pm <span class="cat-links">• Section: <a href="http://blogs.theprovince.com/category/opinion/" title="View all posts in Opinion" rel="category tag">Opinion</a></span></p><br>
<p><br></p>
<p>Canada’s changing linguistic makeup should provide an impetus to revisit bilingualism as currently defined by Ottawa.</p>
<p>A new study by Quebec professor François Vaillancourt and three of
his colleagues recently published by the Fraser Institute implicitly
raises questions about current approaches to bilingualism. (For the
record, the authors take no position on whether official bilingualism is
good or bad policy).</p>
<p>The authors note bilingualism costs $2.4 billion a year, with $868
million of that spent by the provinces and rest spent by Ottawa.</p>
<p>Here are some examples of what the Vaillancourt study does not measure:</p>
<p>1) Duel-labelling requirements that increase the price of Canadian
goods and services. That is likely impossible to quantify — one can’t
find every expenditure on bilingualism by every private company and add
it up — but that’s a real economic cost insofar as some company must
comply with federal requirements even where such compliance is silly.</p>
<p>2) Why must a wine importer ensure both English and French alike are
pasted on a bottle of Malbec from Argentina? Does anyone seriously think
Quebecois wouldn’t recognize a Malbec without required French
labelling? Or that any of us couldn’t understand the contents if the
only label was in Spanish?</p>
<p>3) Why should a small Quebec business be forced to spend money on
bilingual labels for some product it might only export to francophone
communities in Manitoba and New Brunswick? If a company figured it
needed bilingual labels to gain customers — or avoid losing them —
they’d do it voluntarily; that regulation has always been superfluous.</p>
<p>While some provinces have comparatively larger shares of official
linguistic minorities (French or English), only New Brunswick has a
sizable minority unable to communicate in the dominant provincial
language. There, unilingual French speakers are 10 per cent of the
population.</p>
<p>In Quebec, unilingual speakers unable to speak the majority language,
French, constitute just 2.4 per cent of the population. Everywhere
else, unilingual minorities are tiny, just fractions of a per cent.</p>
<p>Beyond the English in Quebec and francophones everywhere else, it’s
useful to consider other “linguistic minorities” to begin an honest
discussion about the future of bilingualism in Canada. British Columbia
is a good place to start. Its numbers illustrate a significant trend:
how other minority languages are swamping French as the top minority
language.</p>
<p> </p>
<a name="pd_a_5870395"></a><div class="PDS_Poll" id="PDI_container5870395" style="display:inline-block"><div style="margin-bottom:0px;margin-top:0px" name="PDI_form5870395" id="PDI_form5870395"><div class="pds-box"><div class="pds-box-outer">
<div class="pds-box-inner"><div class="pds-box-top"><div class="pds-question"><div class="pds-question-outer"><div class="pds-question-inner"><div class="pds-question-top"> Should Canada's official bilingualism be abolished?<br>
<br></div></div></div></div><div class="pds-answer"><span id="pds-answer5870395"><span class="pds-answer-group"><span class="pds-answer-input"><input class="pds-radiobutton" id="PDI_answer26496279" value="26496279" name="PDI_answer5870395" type="radio"></span><label for="PDI_answer26496279" class="pds-input-label"><span class="pds-answer-span">Yes</span></label><span class="pds-clear"></span></span><span class="pds-answer-group"><span class="pds-answer-input"><input class="pds-radiobutton" id="PDI_answer26496280" value="26496280" name="PDI_answer5870395" type="radio"></span><label for="PDI_answer26496280" class="pds-input-label"><span class="pds-answer-span">No</span></label><span class="pds-clear"></span></span><span class="pds-answer-group"><span class="pds-answer-input"><input class="pds-radiobutton" id="PDI_answer26496281" value="26496281" name="PDI_answer5870395" type="radio"></span><label for="PDI_answer26496281" class="pds-input-label"><span class="pds-answer-span">Non!!!</span></label><span class="pds-clear"></span></span><span class="pds-answer-group"><span class="pds-answer-input"><input class="pds-radiobutton" id="PDI_answer26496282" value="26496282" name="PDI_answer5870395" type="radio"></span><label for="PDI_answer26496282" class="pds-input-label"><span class="pds-answer-span">French is fine, but all languages should be equal.</span></label><br>
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<p> </p>
<p>British Columbia has the smallest percentage of people who list
French as their mother tongue, at just 1.3 per cent. In B.C. (and here I
depart from the study and into 2006 Statistics Canada census data),
Chinese dialects account for 8.4 per cent of the population. Punjabi
comes next (3.9 per cent) and German (2.1 per cent). Minority languages
in B.C. that look to overtake French soon due to immigration patterns
are Tagalog and Spanish. In all, non-official languages already make up
almost 27 per cent of B.C.’s population.</p>
<p>In Alberta, languages listed as one’s mother tongue include Chinese
dialects (3.0 per cent), German (2.6 per cent) and then French (1.9 per
cent).</p>
<p>In Ontario, just 25,000 people speak French at home in Toronto, while
almost 1.4 million people speak a non-official language (and 3.5
million speak English).</p>
<p>Overall, in Canada’s most populous province, French as a mother
tongue (at 4.1 per cent of the population) is still second after
English. However, only 6,000 people separate that second-place position
from those who identified a Chinese dialect (4.0 per cent) as their
mother tongue.</p>
<p>French is in relative decline even in Quebec, albeit marginally. In
2006, 79 per cent of Quebecers identified French as their first language
compared to 82.5 per cent in 1951.</p>
<p>Here’s the broad overview: People who speak more than one language
have opportunities to interact with others in a manner unilingual
speakers do not; they also have greater career opportunities.
Bilingualism is thus desirable for personal reasons, though that doesn’t
necessitate laws, regulations or even constitutional action. Of course,
all of those have been at play in Canada and constitutional mandates in
particular are almost impossible mechanisms with which to fiddle.</p>
<p>Bilingualism in Canada’s political context has always been
interpreted to be “English and French.” What’s obvious is that apart
from Quebec, Canada’s new bilingual makeup is about English plus some
language other than French.</p>
<p>The growth of non-official languages raises two observations. First,
the simple demographic fact of Canada’s linguistic makeup is shifting in
a way that makes official bilingualism policies and at least some of
the money routinely spent dated.</p>
<p>Second, unless one aims for a career in the civil service (federally
and in some provinces) or in federal politics, Cantonese, Mandarin,
Korean and Spanish might be more helpful to a child’s future career.</p><p><a href="http://blogs.theprovince.com/2012/01/23/mark-milke-is-it-time-to-reconsider-official-bilingualism/">http://blogs.theprovince.com/2012/01/23/mark-milke-is-it-time-to-reconsider-official-bilingualism/</a><br>
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