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., 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.
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.
Its principles were later incorporated into the Constitution of Canada, in Section 16 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
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.
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 fulfillment 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."
Read more about this topic: Official Languages Act (Canada)
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