Canada: Bilingualism: a failed policy? Language neurosis is our identity

Sat Apr 5 15:26:05 UTC 2008

Bilingualism: A failed policy? Language neurosis is our identity

KONRAD YAKABUSKI

>>From Saturday's Globe and Mail

April 5, 2008 at 12:00 AM EDT

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."
 [image: Parents and children protest outside the New Brunswick legislature
against a government plan to change French immersion education in the
province.]

Parents and children protest outside the New Brunswick legislature against a
government plan to change French immersion education in the province. (Brian
Atkinson for the Globe and Mail)
Related Articles

Recent

   - Plan to scrap early immersion faces
probe<http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080404.wlanguage04/BNStory/specialComment>

   - 'We want to be bilingual!' 'We love
French!'<http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080331.wlanguag31/BNStory/specialComment>

>>From the archives

   - *Globe editorial: *Immersion delayed, immersion
denied<http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080328.weFrenchNB29/BNStory/specialComment>

   - PQ Leader scales down praise of bilingualism after sovereigntist
   furor<http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080214.wlanguage14/BNStory/specialComment>

[image: The Globe and Mail]

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

More early-age French immersion would not reverse that trend. Quality,
already dubious due to a lack of truly bilingual teachers, would decline as
quantity expands. Even most current French-immersion graduates — the
minority who stick with the program until the end — have an astonishingly
approximate grasp of the language. It's bad enough that they make basic
grammatical and syntactical errors when speaking. (Don't ask about their
written French). But plop most of them down in front of Tout le Monde en
Parle or Ici Louis-José Houde, and they'd be lost. Current immersion
programs seem to leave their graduates almost as completely disconnected
from the daily reality of life in French Canada as non-graduates. How can
that be nation-building?

If immersion doesn't open the door to the other solitude, why do people get
so upset when there's less of it available? It's because parents want their
kids immersed all right, just not necessarily in French. "Immersion is like
having an elitist private school within the public system," one Ontario
teacher explained. "It's the highest-achieving kids who get chosen. Class
sizes are generally smaller. One couple told me they were so happy their son
was being filtered from the dregs, which was actually how they put it."
Immersion students may turn out to be Canada's equivalents to France's
énarques, the graduates of the elite École Nationale d'Administration
Publique, who inevitably go on to positions of power and influence in French
society.

In this light, New Brunswick's decision to opt for intensive French in Grade
5 and optional immersion later on, is quite defensible. Too many
non-immersion kids get left behind because they are squeezed into classes
where their numbers overwhelm the ability of the most gifted teachers to
meet their needs. The collectivity suffers as a result. Except for the haste
with which it seems to have made this decision, New Brunswick's Liberal
government does not deserve to be excoriated.

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. There is no early English immersion in Finnish
public schools. Kids don't start basic English classes until they're nine.
Yet it is almost impossible to find a Finn under 40 who does not speak
crisp, elegant, near-perfect English. And it's not as if there's a ton of
opportunities to practise on the streets of Oulu or Jyväskylä. Most Finns
master English on top of Swedish, though Finnish has almost no resemblance
to Swedish, unlike English to French. But if you're serious about being
bilingual or trilingual, you do what you have to.

THE NATIONAL BROADCASTER

In Canada, we aren't and don't. Claude Dubois knows all about that. The
iconic Quebec singer just sold more than 250,000 copies of his latest album
and was inducted last month into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame. But
when the CBC ran a taped version of the concert featuring inductees, Mr.
Dubois and the other francophone artists were cut. Our ratings-obsessed
national broadcaster was afraid French content might scare away viewers. It
was an insult to Mr. Dubois and Quebec; both took it as one. CBC executive
vice-president Richard Stursberg apologized. "Upon reflection," he
explained, the network should have tried harder to show "the full diversity
of the participants." At the CBC, the other official language is an
afterthought. We've receded. In the 1970s, francophone stars were regularly
featured on the CBC; Ginette Reno and René Simard had their own variety
shows. For a generation of English viewers, this was their first window onto
Quebec culture. It may have inspired a few of them to learn French, and
certainly raised their consciousness.

Today, the CBC broadcasts Canada's Next Great Prime Minister without even
lip service to the other official language. But what is one to expect from a
show whose main sponsor is a company (Magna International) whose former and
future senior executive once ran for the leadership of a national political
party without uttering a single word in French? Months later, when she
crossed the floor to the Liberals, the best Belinda Stronach could offer
francophone journalists was: "En anglais, s'il vous plaît."

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. It's got reason to be
afraid. That is what has happened everywhere else, from New England to
Willow Bunch. Four decades of official bilingualism have done nothing to
alleviate that threat. It never could, or can. And so we beat on, to
paraphrase F. Scott Fitzgerald, boats against the current, borne back
ceaselessly into our mutual unilingualism.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080404.wcoessay0405/BNStory/specialComment/home

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