If you want to get a job in Ottawa, it certainly helps if you know French. In this city, it’s not just jobs with the government that require bilingualism. Any job, from sales positions to engineering, might ask for proficiency in both of our official languages.
If you want to work at a Starbucks downtown, you better be able to take orders in French and English.
For Ottawa, the demand for bilingualism makes sense. Knowing French is practical because of our proximity to Quebec. But for those of us coming from the rest of Canada, bilingualism isn’t a reality.
Canada is only bilingual on paper. Quite literally, for most Canadians, it seems to be that the only place French is seen is on official documents and the sides of cereal boxes. French, though a large part of our history, is not widely spoken in this country.
According to the most recent data from Statistics Canada, only 5.8 million Canadians – 17.5 per cent of the population – consider themselves able to conduct a conversation in both English and French.
This isn’t because more than 80 per cent of our population was too lazy to learn it. It’s because French education simply is not equally available across this country.
Consider this: of all of the provinces and territories, only three (Ontario, Quebec and New Brunswick) have compulsory core French classes for students after the Grade 8. In Ontario only one core French credit is required in high school, which by no means provides students with a level of fluency that could be considered bilingualism.
It would be fair to say that the average Ontario Anglophone couldn’t get past introducing themselves and ordering a meal having only taken core French up to the required age, much less have a conversation.
Although many secondary schools offer French courses optionally, only enrolment in French immersion programs will guarantee students remain taking French until they graduate. According to Canadian Parents for French, as of 2011 only 14 per cent of Canadian students were enrolled in French immersion programs, and only 35.8 per cent are enrolled in core French courses.
On top of this, we live in a country of which 20.6 per cent of the population was born in another country. Statistics Canada reports that between 2006 and 2011, 1,162,900 foreign-born people immigrated to Canada. Those with native tongues other than English or French were reported to most commonly speak Chinese languages, Tagalogw, Spanish and Punjabi.
In 2011, 6,838,705 Canadians identified an immigrant language as their mother tongue, with Chinese languages, Indo-Iranian languages (Urdu, Punjabi, Hindi) and romance languages (Spanish, Portuguese, Italian) all totalling more than a million native speakers.
In many parts of the country, students probably would feel a lot more motivated to learn one of these languages.
But French is a part of our history and an important part of Canadian identity. We are a bilingual country, and there is no reason we shouldn’t remain that way. It is an ideal that has been debated for so long and realistically is not going to disappear soon.
The federal government does have some programs available to Canadians that are a good start. The Explore program, which sends Canadian university students to French-speaking regions for a five-week immersion course, is available and covered by a bursary. Permanent residents have taxpayer-funded English or French classes available to them.
But if we really want to be a bilingual country, there needs to be more than this. A major change in our education systems nationwide must take place.
If the federal government set aside some money to give to the provinces specifically for improving French education, things would change. In one generation, if French as a second language started earlier and ended later, we could have a population of young people that are truly bilingual.
In the Saarland region of Germany, which borders France, there is a similar issue with bilingualism. The region recently announced a plan to be completely bilingual by 2043. It will do this by instituting French taught from primary school age and mandatory fluency in both French and German for all public-sector jobs. Canada could use a similar approach.
We now live in a country where only a select group of Canadians could come and work in the nation’s capital: those whose parents had the foresight to enroll them in French immersion, those who have been able to afford some kind of exchange in a French-speaking area, or those whose high school taught core French at a level that ensured some kind of fluency.
This should not be the case. If we want to call ourselves bilingual, we need to start putting our money where our mouth is.