Major Milestones from 1967 to Today

• Date: 22 August 2023
• Author: Michel Bastarache

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 

Major Milestones from 1967 to Today

While language issues during the f‌irst one hundred years after Con-

federation were def‌ined by the assimilatory policies adopted by the

linguistic majority, the subsequent f‌ifty years were marked by the

hard-won victories of minority-language communities and the pro-

tections they ultimately obtained.

e reversal came mostly from the Bilingualism and Bicultural-

ism Commission, which investigated mounting tensions between

the linguistic communities in the s, and the adoption of the

Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. e implementation of the

modern liberal approach to language rights by the Supreme Court

also played a major role. Federal bilingualism, bilingualism in New

Brunswick, access to minority-language education across Canada,

and a number of other rights won through political eorts and

legal challenges allowed for the preservation and the development

of ocial minority-language communities across Canada.

While many challenges persist, some of which will be explored in

the next chapter, the next few pages will describe some of the gains

made in the last half-century. ese events have not only shaped the

future of the linguistic communities of Canada, but they have also

changed the political conf‌iguration of Canada.

THE RECOGNITION OF TWO OFFICIAL LANGUAGES IN CANADA

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The Bilingualism and Biculturalism Commission

(1963–1970)

To understand the drastic changes that occurred in Canada during

the s, it is important to mention Quebec’s Quiet Revolution

and how it set the stage for fundamental changes to the Canadian

identity. As previously discussed, the Roman Catholic church played

a fundamental role in the lives of French-speaking Canadians; the

church ran many of the French-language schools throughout Can-

ada. It had very close ties with the Union Nationale party, which gov-

erned in Quebec almost uninterrupted from  to . Quebec’s

economic class, meanwhile, was dominated by an English-speaking

elite, mostly situated in Montreal.

With the death of Premier Maurice Duplessis and the fall of

the Union Nationale party in , the newly elected Liberal gov-

ernment of Jean Lesage sought to institute a new Quebec society,

where control of health care, education, and social assistance would

be administered by the government, not the church. Lesage’s govern-

ment also emphasized the need for francophones to reclaim control

over the province’s economic sector and to obtain a larger presence

in the federal administration, which, at the time, functioned almost

exclusively in English. is obviously did not sit well with the Eng-

lish-speaking majority in Canada; it was unwilling to give up its

dominance over both the economy and the federal public service.

e conf‌lict emboldened nationalism in Quebec. Many intellectuals

and politicians claimed that separation from Canada would be the

only way for French-speaking Quebecers to give life to Lesage’s slo-

gan, Maître chez nous (“Masters in our own house”).

e f‌irst person to call for a royal commission to investigate

these tensions was André Laurendeau, editor in chief of Le Devoir,

a nationalist newspaper published in Montreal. In an editorial

published  January , Laurendeau called for a commission

that would seek to discover what Canadians thought of bilingual-

ism, how other countries dealt with tensions between linguistic

communities, and evaluate the level of bilingualism present in all