There once was a time in Canada when an anglophone prime minister could get away with not being bilingual. But this began to change in the late 1950’s, notably with the victory of Saskatchewan’s John Diefenbaker and his Progressive Conservatives. Since then it has rapidly become politically impossible, and with good reason.
The CCF’s Tommy Douglas, another unilingual westerner from Saskatchewan, was sympathetic to the problem Diefenbaker faced at the time, but he was also quite clear on why this was a real problem.[i] Diefenbaker himself thought he had solved the problem by appointing a Quebec lieutenant, (Leon Balcer), and then, for good measure, a Quebecois Governor General, Georges Vanier. He was wrong.
Unfortunately for Diefenbaker, the times ‘they were a changin’. His appointments were seen as mere tokenism, and Quebecers were not amused by their prime minister’s disastrous attempts to speak to them directly. Who could forget the stories of John Diefenbaker venturing a few words of excruciatingly incomprehensible French on one of his rare forays into the province? And who could forget the scathing response of a young Rene Levesque, a popular Radio Canada journalist, who railed against the prime minister who, among his many failings, could not speak “un maudit mot de français”?
By 1960 the tired Union National government of Maurice Duplessis was replaced with the Jean Lesage Liberals, who ushered in the Quiet Revolution, and nothing would ever be the same again. ln the space of a few short years Rene Levesque had become a popular minister in the Lesage government, responsible for the nationalization of the province’s energy resources in Hydro Quebec. He was also one of the strongest proponents of the party’s “mâitres chez nous” platform. However he became increasingly nationalistic and increasingly critical of his party’s “difficult” relations with the federal government (by then led by Lester Pearson’s Liberals) and promptly quit the provincial Liberals after they were defeated in 1966. He soon founded the Mouvement Souveraineté-Association, which in October 1968 became the Parti Québécois, and the rest is history.
In Levesque’s foundational treatise, An Option for Quebec, the introductory paragraph says it all. “We are Québécois… At the core of this personality is the fact that we speak French. Everything else depends on this one essential element and follows from it or leads infallibly back to it.”[ii]
Who, then, could have been surprised at the importance that Pierre Trudeau placed on bilingualism on becoming prime minister in 1968? Trudeau, after all, had recently arrived in Ottawa from Quebec with his friends Jean Marchand and Gerard Pelletier in tow, specifically to ensure that the federal government showed Quebecers that they belonged in Canada. From the funding of minority language education programs and the introduction of the federal Official Languages Act in 1969, to its entrenchment in the Charter of Fundamental Rights and Freedoms in the Constitution Act, 1982, Trudeau saw institutional bilingualism as the cornerstone of that message. And so has every Liberal prime minister since then, from John Turner and Paul Martin to Jean Chretien and Justin Trudeau.
Perhaps equally significant is the fact that Conservative leader Stephen Harper, (a self-described unilingual westerner), invested enormous time and energy in his efforts to become functionally bilingual in order to become prime minister. Those efforts paid off. And when his successors Andrew Scheer and Erin O’Toole floundered in Quebec, it is surely not an accident that the party then turned to a fluently bilingual candidate, Pierre Poilievre, as its next champion.
Which brings us to the Liberal Party of Canada’s recent decision to bar Liberal MP Chandra Arya from the party’s leadership race. The party Executive have every right to do so under a section of the constitution that permits them to reject candidates who are “manifestly unfit for the office of Leader of the Party” due to “public statements, past improper conduct, a lack of commitment to democracy, or other reputational or legal jeopardy.”
It is unfortunate that the Executive did not explain how this section applies to Mr. Arya, and the constitution does not oblige them to do so. However Mr. Arya’s public statements after declaring his candidacy provide ample evidence of one glaring reason why they might have felt this was necessary, namely, his repeated assertions that a Liberal leader does not need to be bilingual. This is such a clear and fundamental contradiction of Liberal orthodoxy that it hardly bears further explanation. Simply put, this is a basic tenet of Liberalism and, as such, is on a completely different plane from mere disagreements over party policies related to issues such as the monarchy, pipelines or tariffs. It is, in fact, non-negotiable.
Ironically it is very likely that Mr. Arya could have remained as a candidate in the leadership race if he had not made these public assertions, assuming he was able to meet the financial and other qualifying conditions. In that case the decision to reject him could have been left to the Liberal members voting in the race, who clearly would have found him unqualified and as a result he would have been dropped off the ballot in short order. But at least this would have spared him the humiliation of such a dramatic expulsion.
Interestingly, bilingualism has also been raised as an issue in this Liberal leadership race from the opposite perspective. Given the high level of linguistic competence of previous Liberal leaders, some discussion has actually taken place over whether the two frontrunners in the race are sufficiently bilingual, a concern that has not been raised for decades. And this is the case despite the fact that both Mark Carney and Chrystia Freeland could be described as fluently bilingual, in the sense that they are both more than able to converse and communicate their views in both official languages. Put another way, the bar has been raised to a very high level in the Liberal Party and voters, especially Quebecers, have come to have high expectations of party leaders as a matter of course.
Perhaps one measure of how far Pierre Trudeau’s formal emphasis on bilingualism has come in achieving Quebecer’s confidence in, and attachment to, the federal government and Canada is the very fact that the Liberals have soared to first place in the province in opinion polls, tied with the Bloc, in spite of this less than stellar linguistic competence on the part of their potential leaders. (According to statistics Canada, some 76% of francophone Quebecers see bilingualism as an extremely positive measure and one which is a central characteristic of what it means to be Canadian.[iii])
Indeed, in a Leger poll with Carney cited as the hypothetical leader, the Liberals surge to 38% support, some 14 points ahead of the Bloc.[iv] Analysts, including Chantale Hebert of the CBC “At Issue” panel, believe Quebecers are willing to cut Carney some slack in terms of his French as they, along with the rest of us, face the very real threat posed by Donald Trump’s tariff mania.
Put another way, it seems clear that while not all francophone Quebecers may think they have achieved linguistic nirvana, they surely see how their linguistic as well as their economic situation would be hopelessly undermined by some type of merger with the U.S. And perhaps this potential crisis has caused them to view far more favourably the linguistic protection they have long received from the federal government and Liberal prime ministers.
[i] https://diefenbaker.usask.ca/exhibits/online-exhibits-content/one-canada/section-5.php
[ii] Levesque. An Option for Quebec. (Montreal: McLelland and Stewart, 1968).p.14
[iii] https://www.canada.ca/en/canadian-heritage/services/official-languages-bilingualism/publications/statistics.html
[iv] https://nationalpost.com/news/liberals-are-surging-back-in-quebec-bring-it-on-says-leader-of-the-bloc
