Timeline of Official Languages Policy in Canada - General Themes in Official Languages Policy

General Themes in Official Languages Policy

Official languages policies, in one form or another, have been in existence since the British occupation of Acadia in 1710 caused the English and French languages to come into contact for the first time on North American soil. Prior to this, French had been the sole language used in France's North American colonial possessions, English had been the sole language of Britain's colonies, and no framework for the interaction of the two languages had been needed.

In what is now the eastern half of the country, some sort of accommodation was made for French during the long period of British colonial rule that followed, but at no point did the language achieve full legal and practical equality with English. The public reaction to this situation was one of the sources of the political instability that led to the adoption of a series of constitutions, culminating in the adoption of a federal structure in 1867 as a way of allowing the two languages to have different levels of official status in different provinces.

Following Confederation in 1867, French and English were treated as being fully equal within Quebec, in all matters under provincial jurisdiction. In matters under federal jurisdiction, English occupied a de facto privileged position, and French was not fully equal, although it did enjoy some constitutionally protected privileges. In other provinces, French was sometimes tolerated and sometimes actively suppressed.

Over the course of the Twentieth and early Twenty-first centuries, the two languages have gradually achieved a greater level of equality in most of Canada's provinces, and full equality at the federal level. The trend has been very different in Quebec, however, where in the 1970s English was formally deprived of its status of full legal equality. Today, French is, both de facto and de jure, the sole official language of Quebec.