The Official Languages Act (French: Loi sur les langues officielles) is a Canadian law that came into force on September 9, 1969,[1] which gives French and English equal status in the government of Canada.[2] This makes them "official" languages, having preferred status in law over all other languages. Although the Official Languages Act is not the only piece of federal language law, it is the legislative keystone of Canada's official bilingualism. It was substantially amended in 1988. Both languages are equal in Canada's government and in all the services it controls, such as the courts.
that Canadians will be able to be heard before federal courts in the official language of their choice;
that Parliament will adopt laws and to publish regulations in both official languages, and that both versions will be of equal legal weight;
that English and French will have equal status of languages of work within the federal public service within geographically defined parts of the country that are designated bilingual (most notably in the National Capital Region, Montreal and New Brunswick), as well as in certain overseas government offices and in parts of the country where there is sufficient demand for services in both official languages. In remaining geographical areas, the language of work for federal public servants is French (in Quebec) and English (elsewhere);
The Federal government has set in place regulations establishing linguistic categories (anglophone, francophone, bilingual) for some job functions within the public service. Departments and agencies of the federal government are required to fill these positions with individuals who are capable of serving the public in English, in French, or in both languages. Unilingual public servants are given incentives to learn the other official language, and the government provides language training and offers a "bilingualism bonus".
Part VI of the Act mandates that English-speaking Canadians and French-speaking Canadians not be discriminated against based on ethnic origin or first language learned when it comes to employment opportunities and advancement.[4]
The law also created the Commissioner of Official Languages, an officer of Parliament charged with receiving complaints from the public, undertaking inquiries, and making recommendations regarding the status of the two official languages.
Section 32 of the Official Languages Act authorizes the Governor in Council (i.e., the federal cabinet) to issue regulations defining the geographic regions in which services will be offered by the federal government in the relevant minority language (English in Quebec and French elsewhere).[5] This provides a legal definition for the otherwise vague requirement that services be provided in the minority official languages wherever there is "significant demand." The definition used in the regulations is complex, but basically an area of the country is served in both languages if at least 5,000 persons in that area, or 5% of the local population (whichever is smaller), belongs to that province's English or French linguistic minority population.[6] The regulations were first promulgated in 1991.[7]
Political context
The Official Languages Act was one of the cornerstones of the government of Pierre Trudeau. The law was an attempt to implement some of the policy objectives outlined by the federally commissioned Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, which had been established in 1963 and since that time had been issuing periodic reports on the inequitable manner in which Canada's English-speaking and French-speaking populations were treated by the federal administration. At that time, only 9% of jobs within the federal public service were occupied by Francophones,[8] even though French-speakers formed a quarter of the Canadian population. The proportion of jobs designated bilingual grew to 14% in 1978, and to 25% in 2004.[9]
One of the most important features of the 1969 act was to ensure that federal government services would be provided in both official languages, wherever population size warranted it.
A new Official Languages Act was enacted in 1988 in order to achieve two objectives.
First, it was necessary to update the 1969 law to take into account the new language-related obligations that the federal government had undertaken under Sections 16-23 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which had been enacted in 1982. For example, Section 20 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the right of the Canadian public to communicate in English and French with any central government office or with regional offices where there is "a significant demand for communication with and services from that office." Significant demand is not defined in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. One of the purposes of the Official Languages Act of 1988 was to remedy this omission.[citation needed]
Second, the new law included provisions for the promotion by the government of Canada of Quebec's English-speaking minority and of the French-speaking minorities in the rest of the country. The programs that fall under the "promotion" umbrella are often designed to encourage each provincial government to offer services to its official-language minority community, and contain a mechanism for transferring funds to the provincial governments in order to finance a part of these programs. Under Canada's federal constitution, many important services, such as education and health, fall under provincial jurisdiction and are therefore off-limits to any direct federal spending. The transfer of federal funds, conditional upon the fulfilment by each provincial government of detailed conditions laid out in a funding agreement, is a constitutionally permitted method of dodging this jurisdictional constraint.
This would suggest that the Official Languages Act and Quebec's Charter of the French Language (also known as "Bill 101") are fundamentally at cross-purposes with each other. However, that perspective is not universally accepted. For example, former Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff has stated that "Bill 101 and the Official Languages Act are not in opposition, they are complementary."[10]
In 1969, the law was adopted with all-party support in the House of Commons of Canada. Despite this, there was not universal support for the law. The premiers of the three Prairie provinces requested, early in 1969, that the Official Languages Bill be referred to the Supreme Court of Canada to determine its constitutionality. They maintained, along with JT Thorson, the former president of the Exchequer Court of Canada, that the bill was outside the powers of the Parliament of Canada.[11] The reference to the court was never made, but the legal question was resolved in 1974, when the Supreme Court ruled, in Jones v. Attorney General of New Brunswick, that the subject matter of the bill was within federal jurisdiction.
In subsequent decades the response from provincial governments to the example set by the federal government has been mixed:
Ontario, which is the home to Canada's largest French-speaking minority, opted instead to enact a law (the French Language Services Act) which provides for services of the provincial government to be made available in certain geographically designated regions, but which does not give the French language either a symbolic or an authoritative status as an equal "official" language of Ontario. However, the English and French versions of statutes and regulations that are enacted or made in both languages are equally authoritative.[13]
Manitoba, which is home to Canada's third-largest French-speaking minority, refused to overturn its ban on the use of French in both the provincial legislature and its courts (which had been in effect since 1890), until it was forced to do so in 1985 by a ruling by the Supreme Court of Canada (Reference re Manitoba Language Rights) that the province was under a constitutional obligation to enact laws in French as well as in English.
Quebec, which is home to an English-speaking minority of over half a million, had traditionally been the only province which was generous in its treatment of its minority-language population, and for this reason had been cited by the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism as the model to be emulated by other provinces. But in the 1970s, the provincial legislature adopted two laws, the Official Language Act (also known as "Bill 22") and the Charter of the French Language (also known as "Bill 101"), reducing the access of Quebecers to English-language services, preventing immigrants and Francophones from enrolling their children in English schools, requiring that French be made the language of the workplace, and restricting the use of English on commercial signs.
Public reactions
Public support for bilingual services had dramatically increased between the mid-1960s and the end of the 1970s. There was no direct polling on the popularity of the Official Languages Act itself at the time, but poll data on related questions gives an indication of a significant shift in the attitudes of English-speaking Canadians. A 1965 poll showed that 17% of Canadians living outside Quebec favored the use of public funds to finance French-language schools. This proportion had risen to 77% by 1977 (albeit in response to a slightly different question about support for provincial governments offering services in French "where possible").[14]
Within Quebec, changes to the treatment of French-speakers within the federal public service were met with approval mixed with skepticism that this actually helped the unilingual French-speaking majority of Quebecers, who continued to be excluded from all federal jobs designated "bilingual", since by definition a "bilingual" job requires the use of English.
However, the changes found some opposition in English Canada. Toronto Telegram columnist Braithwaither sums up the position of the opponents of the bill like this: "We are not afraid of any aspect of the language bill, we simply regard it as unnecessary, politically-motivated, costly to implement, divisive, and, as it affects the non-English, non-French third of the population, wholly discriminatory."[15]
As per the bill, some positions in the public sector were designated as bilingual. At the implementation of the bill, if a bilingual position was held by a unilingual anglophone, this person was allowed to keep their position on the condition that they attempted to learn French, and all subsequent holders of this position must be bilingual. Under these circumstances, there were fears that, because of the higher rate of bilingualism among Francophones, people whose first official language is French would become overrepresented in the public sector. However, this has not become the case. The ratio of French first official language speakers to English first official language speakers in the public sector is almost the same as in the general population.[16][17]
At any rate, the adoption of official bilingualism at the federal level did almost nothing to slow the rise of the sovereignist movement. The nationalist Parti Québécois made its first significant electoral breakthrough less than a year after the Official Languages Act was adopted, winning 23% of the vote in Quebec's 1970 provincial election and replacing the Union Nationale as the main electoral vehicle for Quebec nationalism. Six years later, the Parti Québécois came to power in the 1976 provincial election.
Failure to implement all provisions of the Official Languages Act
From time to time, the Official Languages Commissioner draws attention to the fact that federal agencies subject to the law are failing to live up to their legal obligations regarding official languages. In a report published in 2004 on the 35th anniversary of the Official Languages Act, Commissioner Dyane Adam noted that only 86% of posts designated "bilingual" in the federal public service were occupied by persons who had effectively mastered the two official languages. This nevertheless was an increase over the comparable figure of 1978, when only 70% of the incumbents in posts that had been designated "bilingual" were capable of speaking both languages at accepted levels.[18]
Opinion polls
According to a poll conducted in 2002, 98% of Quebecers consider official bilingualism to be "very important" or "somewhat important". This proportion drops to 76% in the Atlantic provinces, 72% in Ontario, 67% in the Prairie provinces, and 63% in British Columbia.[19] Another poll, conducted in 2000, shows that more than half of Canadians outside Quebec believe that too much effort has gone into promoting bilingualism. By contrast, only 26% of Quebecers shared this view.[20] A poll conducted in 2012 found that 63% of Canadians were in favour of bilingualism for all of Canada, a 9% increase since that same poll was last conducted in 2003.[21]
In 2016, another poll was conducted, showing increasing support for official bilingualism in every province. Among telephone respondents, 88% of Canadians said they "strongly support" or "somewhat support" the aims of the Official Languages Act: 91% in the Atlantic, 94% in Quebec, 87% in Ontario, 83% in the Prairies, 90% in Alberta and 84% in British Columbia. 84% of telephone respondents also said they personally "strongly support" or "somewhat support" official bilingualism. The results were more mixed in the online portion of the poll, where 78% of respondents said they "strongly support" or "somewhat support" the aims of the Official Languages Act, and 73% said they personally "strongly support" or "somewhat support" official bilingualism. In another poll conducted on this topic in the same year, 67% of respondents across Canada answered "yes" to the question "Are you personally in favour of bilingualism for all of Canada?" while 31% said "no".[22]
Reform proposals
2021 OLA modernisation bill
In June 2021 the Government of Canada introduced a parliamentary bill to modernize the Official Languages Act in a changing and more digital society.[23]
Bill C-13
In 2022, the Government of Canada tabled Bill C-13 which amends the Official Languages Act and other related legislation.[24][25][26][27] As of June 15, 2023, Bill C-13 passed third reading in the Senate and is awaiting royal assent.[28]
Including more languages
The Official Languages Act applies to English and French, but does not include formal protections any other languages spoken in Canada, Indigenous or otherwise. In a Winnipeg allocution during his first term, Pierre Elliott Trudeau said that French was selected as an official language mostly because of the important demographic weight within Canada. As such, if and when Ukrainian would represent the mother tongue of, say, 10% of the population, Trudeau assured the crowd that steps would be taken to make Ukrainian an official language of Canada as well.[29]
More recently, Romeo Saganash, the NDP Member of Parliament for Abitibi—Baie-James—Nunavik—Eeyou from 2011 to 2019, proposed that every single indigenous languages still spoken today become an official language of Canada.[30] Saganash also advocates for the right to speak indigenous languages in the House of Commons and the Senate.[31]
↑ Canada. Rapport de la Commission royale d’enquête sur le bilinguisme et le biculturalisme. Livre III: le monde du travail. Ottawa, Imprimeur de la Reine, 1969, p. 374
↑ Ignatieff made the comment at the Liberal Party of Canada's Quebec convention in early October 2009. He is quoted in Don Macpherson, "NDP would add rights for French Quebecers", in the Montreal Gazette, October 8, 2009.
↑ Thorson's arguments are discussed, and rejected, by Eugene Forsey in "The Constitutionality of the Official Languages Act", Globe and Mail, February 8, 1969.
↑ "Introduction of the bill — Modernizing and Strengthening the Official Languages Act". Canada.ca. Government of Canada - Gouvernement du Canada. June 15, 2021. Retrieved August 1, 2021. The last major reform of the OLA dates back to 1988, and the intervening changes in Canada's linguistic dynamics have ushered in new realities that necessitate changes to our language regime and its modernization.
Franco-Ontarians are Francophone Canadians that reside in the province of Ontario. Most are French Canadians from Ontario. In 2021, according to the Government of Ontario, there were 650,000 Francophones in the province. The majority of Franco-Ontarians in the province reside in Eastern Ontario, Northeastern Ontario, and Central Ontario, although small francophone communities may be found in other regions of the province.
The Quebec sovereignty movement is a political movement whose objective is to achieve the independence of Quebec from Canada. Sovereignists suggest that the people of Quebec make use of their right to self-determination – a principle that includes the possibility of choosing between integration with a third state, political association with another state or independence – so that Québécois, collectively and by democratic means, give themselves a sovereign state with its own independent constitution.
The Charter of the French Language, also known in English as Bill 101, Law 101, or Quebec French Preference Law, is a law in the province of Quebec in Canada defining French, the language of the majority of the population, as the official language of the provincial government. It is the central legislative piece in Quebec's language policy, and one of the three statutory documents Quebec society bases its cohesion upon, along with the Quebec Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms and the Civil Code of Quebec. The Charter also protects the Indigenous languages of Quebec.
The politics of Quebec are centred on a provincial government resembling that of the other Canadian provinces, namely a constitutional monarchy and parliamentary democracy. The capital of Quebec is Quebec City, where the Lieutenant Governor, Premier, the legislature, and cabinet reside.
The children of Bill 101 is the name given to the generation of children whose parents immigrated to Quebec, Canada after the adoption of the 1977 Charter of the French Language.
The Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism was a Canadian royal commission established on 19 July 1963, by the government of Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson to "inquire into and report upon the existing state of bilingualism and biculturalism in Canada and to recommend what steps should be taken to develop the Canadian Confederation on the basis of an equal partnership between the two founding races, taking into account the contribution made by the other ethnic groups to the cultural enrichment of Canada and the measures that should be taken to safeguard that contribution".
This article presents the current language demographics of the Canadian province of Quebec.
Articles related to Quebec include:
The legal dispute over Quebec's language policy began soon after the enactment of Bill 101, establishing the Charter of the French Language, by the Parliament of Quebec in 1977.
The Official Language Act of 1974, also known as Bill 22, was an act of the National Assembly of Quebec, commissioned by Premier Robert Bourassa, which made French the sole official language of Quebec, Canada. Provincial desire for the Official Language Act came after the repeal of Bill 63. It was ultimately supplanted by the Charter of the French Language in 1977, which imposed French as the only language for advertising and education.
French is the mother tongue of approximately 7.2 million Canadians according to the 2016 Canadian Census. Most Canadian native speakers of French live in Quebec, the only province where French is the majority and the sole official language. Of Quebec's people, 71.2 percent are native francophones and 95 percent speak French as their first or second language.
The official languages of Canada are English and French, which "have equality of status and equal rights and privileges as to their use in all institutions of the Parliament and Government of Canada," according to Canada's constitution. "Official bilingualism" is the term used in Canada to collectively describe the policies, constitutional provisions, and laws that ensure legal equality of English and French in the Parliament and courts of Canada, protect the linguistic rights of English- and French-speaking minorities in different provinces, and ensure a level of government services in both languages across Canada.
Franco-Albertans are francophone residents of the Canadian province of Alberta. Franco-Albertans may also refer to residents of Alberta with French Canadian ancestry, although publications from the government of Alberta use the term Franco-Albertan to refer to its francophone residents. In the 2016 Canadian Census, there were 86,705 Albertans that stated their mother tongue was French. In the same census, there were 411,315 Albertans that claim partial or full French ancestry.
Section 23 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms is the section of the Constitution of Canada that guarantees minority language educational rights to French-speaking communities outside Quebec, and, to a lesser extent, English-speaking minorities in Quebec. The section may be particularly notable, in that some scholars believe that section 23 "was the only part of the Charter with which Pierre Trudeau was truly concerned." Trudeau was the prime minister who fought for the inclusion of the Charter of Rights in the Constitution of Canada in 1982.
Anti-Quebec sentiment is a form of prejudice which is expressed toward the government, culture, and/or the francophone people of Quebec. This prejudice must be distinguished from legitimate criticism of Quebec society or the Government of Quebec, though the question of what qualifies as legitimate criticism and mere prejudice is itself controversial. Some critics argue that allegations of Quebec bashing are sometimes used to deflect legitimate criticism of Quebec society, government, or public policies.
The Québécois nation motion was a parliamentary motion tabled by Prime Minister of Canada Stephen Harper on Wednesday, November 22, 2006 and approved by the House of Commons of Canada on Monday, November 27, 2006. It was approved 265–16 with supporters in every party in the Commons. The English motion read:
That this House recognize that the Québécois form a nation within a united Canada."
Because the country contains two major language groups and numerous other linguistic minorities, in Canada official languages policy has always been an important and high-profile area of public policy.
The language policies of Canada's province and territories vary between the provinces and territories of Canada. Although the federal government operates as an officially bilingual institution, providing services in English and French, several provincial governments have also instituted or legislated their own language policies.
The Act respecting the laicity of the State, introduced and commonly referred to as Bill 21 or Law 21, is a statute passed by the National Assembly of Quebec in 2019 which asserts that Quebec is a lay state. It prohibits the wearing of religious symbols by certain public employees in positions of authority and grandfathers in those who were already in office when the bill was introduced. The statute operates despite the Quebec Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms, and also notwithstanding certain sections of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
English-speaking Quebecers, also known as Anglo-Quebecers, English Quebecers, or Anglophone Quebecers or simply Anglos in a Quebec context, are a linguistic minority in the francophone province of Quebec. According to the 2011 Canadian census, 599,225 people in Quebec declare English as a mother tongue. When asked, 834,950 people reported using English the most at home.
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