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Ottawa offers municipal services in English and French but is not officially bilingual, despite a December 2017 bill intent on requiring the designation. [1]
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One controversial aspect of the City of Ottawa Act was the manner in which it addressed official bilingualism within Ottawa's municipal government. Before the enactment of the Act, Glen Shortliffe, a special advisor appointed by the provincial government to make recommendations on municipal governance in Ottawa–Carleton, recommended in 1999 that the new amalgamated city of Ottawa be designated as officially bilingual, with municipal services available in both English and French.
Ottawa is the capital city of Canada. It stands on the south bank of the Ottawa River in the eastern portion of southern Ontario. Ottawa borders Gatineau, Quebec; the two form the core of the Ottawa–Gatineau census metropolitan area (CMA) and the National Capital Region (NCR). As of 2016, Ottawa had a city population of 964,743 and a metropolitan population of 1,323,783 making it the fourth-largest city and the fifth-largest CMA in Canada.
Glen Scott Shortliffe was a Canadian diplomat, civil servant, businessman, and Clerk of the Privy Council.
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.
The provincial government of the time, led by the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario, refused to enshrine official bilingualism in the City of Ottawa Act, but made clear that the new city was free to establish its own language policy. In 2001, Ottawa City Council passed a bilingualism policy modelled on the policy of the former Ottawa–Carleton Region, whereby English and French were both recognized as having the same rights, status and privileges within the municipal government, while allowing for differences in services based on local needs throughout the amalgamated city.
The Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario, often shortened to Ontario PC Party, PC, or Conservatives, is a centre-right political party in Ontario, Canada. The party has been led by Premier Doug Ford since March 10, 2018.
The Ottawa City Council is the governing body of the City of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. It is composed of 23 city councillors and the mayor. The mayor is elected at large, while each of the councillors represent wards throughout the city. Council members are elected to four year terms with the last election being on October 22, 2018. The council meets at Ottawa City Hall in downtown Ottawa. Much of the council's work is done in the standing committees made up sub-groups of councillors. The decisions made in these committees are presented to the full council and voted upon.
In 2003, the Ontario Liberal Party returned to power at the provincial level, and the new Premier, Dalton McGuinty, publicly stated that the city should be designated bilingual in the Act. Rather than reignite the controversy through a designation, however, the province ultimately announced amendments to the Act in 2004 (which came into force in 2005) to require the city of Ottawa to have a policy respecting its use of French and English. City council revised its bilingualism policy in 2004, offering all its municipal services in both French and English.
The Ontario Liberal Party is a provincial political party in the province of Ontario, Canada. The party is ideologically aligned with the Liberal Party of Canada but the two parties are organizationally independent and have separate, though overlapping, memberships.
Dalton James Patrick McGuinty, Jr., is a Canadian retired politician who served as the 24th Premier of Ontario from 2003 to 2013. He was the first Liberal leader to win two majority governments since Mitchell Hepburn nearly 70 years earlier. In 2011, he became the first Liberal premier to secure a third consecutive term since Oliver Mowat (1872–1896), after his party was re-elected in that year's provincial election.
