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The Alliance for the Preservation of English in Canada (APEC) was a group in Canada, which campaigned against the Canadian government's policy of official bilingualism.
The Government of Canada, officially Her Majesty's Government, is the corporation responsible for the federal administration of Canada. In Canadian English, the term can mean either the collective set of institutions or specifically the Queen-in-Council. In both senses, the current construct was established at Confederation through the Constitution Act, 1867—as a federal constitutional monarchy, wherein the Canadian Crown acts as the core, or "the most basic building block", of its Westminster-style parliamentary democracy. The Crown is thus the foundation of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of the Canadian government. Further elements of governance are outlined in the rest of the Canadian Constitution, which includes written statutes, court rulings, and unwritten conventions developed over centuries.
The group was formed in 1977 by Irene Hilchie, a government employee who felt that she was being discriminated against in her job because she did not speak French. The group's most famous member, however, was Jock V. Andrew, whose book Bilingual Today, French Tomorrow alleged that bilingualism was part of a government plot to make Canada a unilingually French country.
French is a Romance language of the Indo-European family. It descended from the Vulgar Latin of the Roman Empire, as did all Romance languages. French evolved from Gallo-Romance, the spoken Latin in Gaul, and more specifically in Northern Gaul. Its closest relatives are the other langues d'oïl—languages historically spoken in northern France and in southern Belgium, which French (Francien) has largely supplanted. French was also influenced by native Celtic languages of Northern Roman Gaul like Gallia Belgica and by the (Germanic) Frankish language of the post-Roman Frankish invaders. Today, owing to France's past overseas expansion, there are numerous French-based creole languages, most notably Haitian Creole. A French-speaking person or nation may be referred to as Francophone in both English and French.
Bilingual Today, French Tomorrow: Trudeau's Master Plan and How it Can be Stopped was a controversial 1977 book by Jock V. Andrew, a retired naval officer. It alleged that Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau's policy of official bilingualism was a plot to make Canada a unilingually francophone country, by instituting reverse discrimination against anglophone Canadians.
The group was most influential in the late 1980s, as it engaged in activities which contributed to the defeat of the Meech Lake Accord. As well, the group was involved in a campaign to have Ontario municipalities declare themselves English-only, in response to the Ontario government's French Language Services Act . While the act did not apply to municipal government services, APEC represented it as a slippery slope towards such a requirement to convince municipalities to pass English-only resolutions.
The Meech Lake Accord was a series of proposed amendments to the Constitution of Canada negotiated in 1987 by Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and all 10 Canadian provincial premiers. It was intended to persuade the government of Quebec to symbolically endorse the 1982 constitutional amendments by providing for some decentralization of the Canadian federation.
English is a West Germanic language that was first spoken in early medieval England and eventually became a global lingua franca. It is named after the Angles, one of the Germanic tribes that migrated to the area of Great Britain that later took their name, as England. Both names derive from Anglia, a peninsula in the Baltic Sea. The language is closely related to Frisian and Low Saxon, and its vocabulary has been significantly influenced by other Germanic languages, particularly Norse, and to a greater extent by Latin and French.
Most famously, the city of Sault Ste. Marie passed such a resolution on January 29, 1990. Quebec voters perceived the Sault Ste. Marie resolution and the Brockville flag incident as symbols of English Canada's feelings toward Quebec, and the incidents contributed to the resurgence of the Quebec sovereignty movement in the 1990s and thus to the 1995 Quebec referendum.
Sault Ste. Marie is a city on the St. Marys River in Ontario, Canada, close to the U.S.-Canada border. It is the seat of the Algoma District and the third largest city in Northern Ontario, after Sudbury and Thunder Bay.
The Sault Ste. Marie language resolution was a government motion passed on January 29, 1990 by Sault Ste. Marie City Council, the governing body of the city of Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, Canada, which resolved that English was the sole working language of city government. The resolution ignited a national controversy which made the city a flashpoint in the Meech Lake Accord debate.
The Quebec sovereignty movement is a political movement as well as an ideology of values, concepts and ideas that advocates independence for the Canadian province of Quebec.
APEC also worked closely with the Confederation of Regions Party and the Reform Party, two political parties which held similar views about bilingualism and the role of Quebec in Confederation.
The Confederation of Regions Party (CoR) was a right-wing federal political party in Canada founded in 1984 by Elmer Knutson. It was founded as a successor to the Western Canada Federation (West-Fed), a non-partisan organization, to fight the Liberal Party of Canada. The CoR aimed to fill the void on the right of the political spectrum left by the decline of the Social Credit Party of Canada and the growing unpopularity among westerners of the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada under the leadership of Brian Mulroney.
The Reform Party of Canada was a right-wing populist federal political party in Canada that existed from 1987 to 2000. Reform was founded as a Western Canada-based protest movement and eventually became a populist conservative party, with strong social conservative elements. It was initially motivated by the perceived need for democratic reforms and by profound Western Canadian discontent with the Progressive Conservative (PC) federal government of Brian Mulroney.
Canadian Confederation was the process by which the British colonies of the Province of Canada, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick were united into one federation, Canada, on July 1, 1867. Upon confederation, the old province of Canada was divided into Ontario and Quebec; along with Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, the new federation thus comprised four provinces. Over the years since Confederation, Canada has seen numerous territorial changes and expansions, resulting in the current union of ten provinces and three territories.
APEC claims to be not anti-French, but believes that tax money was being wastefully used in the promotion of official bilingualism in Canada.
In February 2000, the organization moved its head office to Toronto, and changed its name to Canadians Against Bilingualism Injustice (CABI). [1] In 2001, the organization changed its name again, becoming the Canadian Network for Language Awareness. [2]
In the 2000 federal election, CABI spent just over $150,000 as a registered third party participant. Most of the funds were used to place advertisements in Ontario newspapers. [3] No such participation has been recorded for subsequent elections.
For years, APEC / CABI owned the domain name www.bilingualism.org, but registration lapsed some time between 2000 and 2010.
