Official Languages Act (Canada)
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The Official Languages Act ( English Official Languages Act , French Loi sur les langues officielles ) is a 1969 by the Parliament of Canada passed in 1988 and revised law. It grants the English and French languages an equal status within the Canadian federal administration. As a result, they are elevated to the status of official languages and, by law, take precedence over other languages. Although the Official Language Act is not the only federal language law, it forms the basis of official bilingualism .
Summary of the main points
The law regulates, among other things,
- that Canadians have the right to receive services from federal agencies and state enterprises in both official languages;
- that Canadians have the opportunity to be heard in federal courts in the official language of their choice;
- that Parliament enacts laws and regulations in both official languages and that both versions have equal rights;
- that in certain geographically defined bilingual areas English and French have the same status as the working language within the federal administration (this mainly applies to the Ottawa , Montreal and New Brunswick region ), but also in certain offices abroad and in parts of the country where a sufficiently large one There is a demand for services in both languages. In the rest of the country, the working language is either French (in Québec ) or English (other provinces).
The federal government has issued ordinances that define the language requirements for certain jobs within the civil service (anglophone, francophone, bilingual). Ministries and authorities of the federal government are obliged to fill these posts with people who meet these requirements. Monolingual government employees are given incentives to learn the other official language. The government offers language courses and grants a bilingual bonus.
Part VI of the law states that English-speaking and French-speaking Canadians should not be discriminated against in job offers or promotions based on their ethnic origin or their mother tongue.
The law also created an authority known as the Official Language Commission . She was given the task of receiving complaints from citizens, conducting inquiries and making recommendations regarding the status of the two official languages.
Section 32 of the Official Language Act empowers the federal cabinet to issue ordinances defining geographic regions in which state services must be provided in the minority language. In general, there is a rule that at least 5000 speakers of the minority language live in a given area or that they make up at least 5% of the total population.
Political context
The official language law was one of the most important achievements of the government of Pierre Trudeau . The law was an attempt to implement some of the recommendations of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism , which had been set up by the federal government in 1963 and has since published regular reports on the inequality of treatment of English and French speakers in the federal administration. At that time only 9% of the jobs within the federal administration were occupied by Francophones, although their share of the population is a quarter. The proportion of jobs for bilingual people increased to 14% by 1978 and to 25% by 2004.
One of the main objectives of the 1969 Act was to ensure that federal government services were offered in both official languages wherever the population indicated it was necessary. This principle was later incorporated into the Canadian Constitution , in Section 16 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms .
In 1988 the Official Language Act was revised to meet two requirements. First, it had become necessary to update the 1969 Act to take into account the language provisions in Sections 16 to 23 of the 1982 Charter. Second, the revised law included provisions to encourage the English-speaking minority in Québec and the French-speaking minority in the remaining provinces. Among other things, federal funds are used to co-finance schools for the linguistic minorities, since education otherwise falls exclusively into the competence of the provinces and territories.
Reactions
Provinces
In 1969 the law was passed with the support of all parties in the House of Commons . However, in the following decades, the reactions of the provinces were very different:
- New Brunswick , where the largest percentage of French-speaking minority lives (around a third of the population), took over the regulations of the federal government shortly afterwards and passed its own official language law.
- Ontario , home to the largest French-speaking minority (about half a million or 4.3%), passed the French Language Services Act , which only offers French-language services to the provincial government in certain areas (either more than 5,000 native speakers or a share of the Total population higher than 10%) and French is not granted full equality with English.
- In Manitoba , the province with the third largest French-speaking minority, parliament and courts refused to lift the 1890 ban on French as the official language. The province was forced to do so in 1985 following a ruling by the Supreme Court because it was against the constitution.
- Québec, with its English-speaking minority, was traditionally the only province that dealt generously with language minorities and was therefore described by the Royal Commission as a model for bilingualism and biculturalism. But the provincial parliament passed two laws in the 1970s, the Official Language Law and the Charter of the French Language . These reduced Quebecers' access to English-language services, prevented immigrants and Francophones from enrolling their children in English-speaking classes, made French the common working language, and even restricted the use of English on commercial lettering.
Public opinion
Public support for bilingual services increased sharply between the mid-1960s and late 1970s. While there are no opinion polls on the Official Language Act itself, polls on similar issues show a marked change in the attitude of Anglo-Canadians. In 1965, a public opinion poll found that only 17% of Canadians living outside Québec supported the use of government funds to fund French-speaking schools. This proportion rose to 77% by 1977 (although the question was less specific and the only question asked was whether the provincial government could agree to the provision of French-language services).
In Québec, changes in the treatment of Francophones within the federal administration met with approval. However, there was skepticism as to whether this would actually be an advantage for the monolingual French-speaking Quebecer minority, who continued to be excluded from all federal jobs advertised as “bilingual”, as this definition requires the use of English. In any case, the introduction of official bilingualism did nothing to curb the rise of the separatist movement. The separatist Parti Québécois made a breakthrough barely a year after the law came into force, garnering 23% of the vote in the provincial elections and replacing the Union nationale as the leading force of Quebec nationalism. Six years later, the Parti Québécois provided the provincial government for the first time.
Approval for the law in the English-speaking part of Canada is markedly lower than in Québec. According to an opinion poll conducted in 2002, 98% of Quebecers consider official bilingualism "very important" or "important". This proportion falls to 76% in the Atlantic provinces , to 72% in Ontario, to 67% in the prairie provinces and to 63% in British Columbia . Another survey from 2000 shows that more than half of Canadians outside Québec believe that too much effort has been put into promoting bilingualism. Only 26% of Quebecers shared this opinion.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ It was last updated in 2015. The web link below always provides the current version, earlier versions can be viewed
- ↑ Part VI of the Official Language Act
- ↑ Calculation of the population
- ^ Report 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
- ^ Commissioner of Official Languages. Annual Report, Special Edition 1969-2004. Volume I. Ottawa, 2006. ISBN 0-662-74073-4 .
- ↑ a b c Andrew Parkin, André Turcotte: Le bilinguisme - Appartient-il au passé ou à l'avenir?, Center de recherche et d'information sur le Canada, 2004.