Many Quebecers wonder why, despite the law making French one of Canada’s two official languages, the federal authorities seem hardly inclined to require candidates for the highest office in the country to be bilingual. […]
The explanation is simple. As my insightful colleague Dave Foot of the University of Toronto has said, “Demography explains two-thirds of everything. In Canada, outside of Quebec and Acadia, in 2016 only 1.3% of young adults aged 25 to 34 (the generation of the future) spoke French regularly at home. In Ontario, it was less than 2%. Canadians were more likely to speak, for example, Tagalog, Punjabi or Mandarin.
The dream of a bilingual country cherished by Prime Minister Trudeau Senior may have been formalized by his Official Languages Act, but it turns out to be completely disconnected from the concrete reality perceived by the Canadian population living outside Quebec and Acadia. The French-speaking population of Canada is microscopic and, consequently, its political and media influence there is… microscopic.
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