Archived - Fifty years later: The legacy of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism – Notes for an address at a conference at the Université de Moncton

Beginning of dialog

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen,

First, I would like to thank the Université de Moncton for agreeing to hold this conference. In particular, I would like to thank Éric Forgues, Executive Director of the Canadian Institute for Research on Linguistic Minorities, and Michel Doucet, Director of the International Observatory on Language Rights.

This is one of a series of conferences, workshops and round tables held across Canada to mark the 50th anniversary of the creation of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism.

I would also like to thank the panellists who enlightened us on the legacy of the Commission in New Brunswick and in the Atlantic Region.

This year, we are celebrating two anniversaries.

The Université de Moncton is celebrating its 50th anniversary, having been founded at the same time as the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism was launched.

Since then, the Université de Moncton has been at the heart of the Acadian community's development and vitality. Many notable Acadians have studied at the Université de Moncton.

For example:

• Michel Bastarache, former Supreme Court judge;
• Herménégilde Chiasson, former lieutenant-governor and multitalented artist; and
• Bernard Lord, former premier of New Brunswick.

We can't talk about the anniversary of the creation of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism and the founding of the Université de Moncton without mentioning the key role of Father Clément Cormier.

He was one of the most renowned educators in Acadian history: he founded the Université de Moncton in 1963, he served as its rector until 1967, and he established the university's Centre d'études acadiennes Anselme-Chiasson.

Throughout his life, he promoted and studied history, language and culture.

Father Cormier was also one of the commissioners on the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism.

His presence helped ensure a better understanding of the situation in New Brunswick and Acadia. And so I find it particularly appropriate to be here, both to talk about the Royal Commission and to celebrate the university's milestone anniversary.

I feel especially privileged to be able to talk about the progress made in terms of linguistic duality and diversity.

In the 1960s, when I was in university, André Laurendeau, Davidson Dunton, Frank Scott and the other members of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism were already studying these issues, which would go on to become a divisive factor in Canada.

I spent my career as a journalist and author dissecting this aspect of Canadian identity.

Now, as Commissioner, I am continuing to monitor this issue very closely.

First of all, what is a Royal Commission?

My late brother once had a political science professor at McGill who, in the early 1950s, described it this way: “What is a Royal Commission? I'll tell you what a Royal Commission is—$100 a day plus expenses!”

More seriously, the late Allan Blakeney described it as “the most traditional form of consultation,” adding “indeed, a case can be made that for at least the last half-century, Royal Commissions and their reports have been a dominant force in shaping public policy in Canada.”^{Footnote 1}

Jane Jenson described Royal Commissions as institutions that represent ideas, that have been “locales for some of the major shifts in the ways that Canadians debate representations of themselves, their present and their futures.” She added, “They set out the terms of who we are, where we have been and what we might become.”^{Footnote 2}

The Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism was a special case. Nelson Wiseman has written that “in the 1960s, biculturalism served as a template for the most noteworthy Royal Commission of that decade.”^{Footnote 3} As Richard Van Loon and Michael Whittington put it in their political science textbook The Canadian Political System, it “featured nine commissioners with a staff of hundreds, and managed, for a few brief years, to eliminate, almost completely, unemployment among Canadian social scientists.”^{Footnote 4}

However, even in the early 1970s, there was a dissident academic view. In 1972, Donald Smiley, a political scientist with roots in Western Canada, called the reports of the Royal Commission the leading expression of what he called “the emergent orthodoxy.” This meant that residents of Western Canada “have come to feel outside the mainstream of national life by the acceptance in Ottawa… of Canada and of the Canadian experience which has little relevance to western life and traditions.”^{Footnote 5}

Other academics, who have adopted the post-structural framework, take a more critical view of Royal Commissions. Eve Haque argues that the Commission legitimized the dominant role of English and French in Canada and marginalized immigrants and Aboriginal peoples. As she put it, “The establishment of the link between language and race in the crucible of modernity meant that, in contemporary nation-building projects—as that of the B and B Commission—language could become the basis of the Other's exclusion.”^{Footnote 6}

I would now like to describe the social and political context that led to the creation of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism.

I would also like to talk to you about the tensions that marked the Commission's deliberations and how those tensions have been reflected, half a century later, in the current debate over language policy in Canada.

The idea of a Royal Commission was first proposed in January 1962 by André Laurendeau in an editorial in Le Devoir, and in July 1963, the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism was announced.

That year and a half was a turbulent time in Quebec.

In June 1962, the Conservatives lost their majority and become a minority government, thanks to the election of 26 Social Credit MPs from Quebec.

In September, Premier Jean Lesage called an election that was fought over the takeover of Quebec's private hydroelectric companies, winning re-election in November.

Throughout the fall, led by House Leader Gilles Grégoire, the Créditiste MPs raised the question of French-language services in Parliament and in Ottawa on a daily basis:

• the Orders of the Day were in English only;
• the menu of the Parliamentary Restaurant was in English only;
• MPs' paycheques were in English only;
• the announcements at Ottawa's Union Station were in English only;
• the service on what was then called Trans-Canada Airlines was in English only.

The list was interminable.

Grégoire spoke or asked questions 134 times in the first 60 days. The federal government operated in English.

On November 19, Donald Gordon, the President of Canadian National Railways, appeared before the House of Commons Railway Committee—and Mr. Grégoire was waiting to question him about the fact that none of the 17 vice-presidents at CN were French-Canadian.

The ensuing controversy resulted in student demonstrations across Quebec, the largest being led by Bernard Landry, then president of the Association générale des étudiants de l'Université de Montréal.

On December 18, 1962, Lester Pearson, then Leader of the Opposition, gave a speech calling for the creation of a Royal Commission, the speech—he said in his memoirs—of which he was the proudest.

In February 1963, the Front de libération du Québec was founded.

In March, three military barracks in Montréal were bombed.

In April—in the second bombing that month—Wilfrid O'Neill, a night watchman, was killed. Also in April, there was a federal election and Lester Pearson became Prime Minister with a minority government.

On election night, crossing paths with Laurendeau, Pearson adviser Maurice Lamontagne said they had to talk.

This was the beginning of an extensive courtship of Laurendeau to become co-chair of the Royal Commission that Pearson had promised in December. Laurendeau's reluctance, which was reinforced by some of the people he consulted, was a reflection of his ambivalence.

Davidson Dunton, Laurendeau's co-chair, was a man of grace and moderation who was then President of Carleton University.

He played an important role in smoothing the tensions between the Commission and the government and in keeping the sometimes spiky personalities of the Commission working together.

But I think it is fair to say that the key debates, and the principal tension on the Commission, were between Laurendeau's approach and that of Frank Scott.

Laurendeau's hesitation about accepting the offer had a number of aspects. He was reluctant to leave Le Devoir and hesitant about compromising his nationalist views.

But I also think that there was a fundamental question of trust.

Could he trust the country?

A year before, he had written a best-selling book that was in part a memoir of his own experience 20 years earlier: La crise de la conscription.

The most well-known quote from his book can be found in the preface: “It is when two nations intensely oppose one another that the extent to which they exist can be measured” [translation].

In his book, Laurendeau explains the theory that the King government had made a pact with French-Canadians: in exchange for participating in the war, there would never be conscription. He wrote, “In short, French-Canadian nationalists were opposed to the very principle of the plebiscite” [translation].

French-Canadian nationalists were staunchly against the government asking the majority to erase a promise made to the minority. They rejected the validity of the response from Canadians before it was ever obtained.

“The pact they [French-Canadians] were referring to was moral in nature. Parliament could legally impose conscription. What the French-Canadian minority was asking the majority to do was prevent Parliament from doing what it had the political power to do” [translation].^{Footnote 7} As a result, the internal debate that he launched in the spring of 1963 was above all a moral debate.

And the key question was the existential one that he and Davidson Dunton asked at the beginning of every public hearing: “Can English-speaking and French-speaking Canadians live together, and do they want to? Under what conditions? And are they prepared to accept those conditions?” The questions struck at the core of the country's existence.

As a commissioner, he was particularly sensitive to the needs of Quebec as a majority French-speaking society.

In August 1965, he wrote in his journal that “bilingualism can only live if it is supported by two unilingualisms, without which bilingualism is a transitory situation which results in the unilingualism of the strongest and most numerous.”^{Footnote 8}

When he was approached to be on the Commission, Frank Scott was Dean of Law at McGill University—10 years after having been passed over because of his left-wing views.

A socialist, one of the authors of the Regina Manifesto, a poet, a constitutional lawyer and a strong defender of civil rights, Scott had first got to know Laurendeau during the late 1930s, when both were trying to build bridges between French and English intellectuals in Montréal.

Scott had also influenced the thinking of Pierre Elliott Trudeau. According to Barry Strayer, of all of Trudeau's early constitutional mentors who were politically active, the most influential was undoubtedly Frank Scott.

Scott's views on language and bilingualism were challenged, sharpened and, in some cases, rejected when he was a member of the Royal Commission.

Scott had always been clear in his views. As a constitutional lawyer, he took a far-reaching interpretation of section 133 of the British North America Act, arguing in 1947 that “British Columbia is already, in an important aspect, a bilingual province.”^{Footnote 9}

Scott was named as the only representative of the English minority in Quebec. That role was a key to his identity in many ways.

He knew all the Quebec members of the Commission and, with the exception of Davidson Dunton, none of the members from the rest of Canada, even though he had a national reputation.

Laurendeau and Dunton were co-chairs, but the real debate, intellectual and emotional, linguistic and national, was between Laurendeau and Scott. Both men had subtle minds, political idealism, personal charisma and poets' sensibilities. As Laforest puts it in his essay on the two men, both were “éminences grises,” or intellectual leaders of Quebec and English-speaking Canada, respectively.

Scott's view was that, although French Canada could legitimately be considered a nation, Quebec was—or should be—a bilingual society. His ideal was that the bilingual model should be extended to Canada as a whole, so that the limited rights defined in the British North America Act would be extended and the language rights that had been extinguished in Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta would be restored.

It took Scott some time to come to terms with Laurendeau's view of the need for two unilingualisms—a view that had been adopted by one of the researchers, William Mackey. “In regard to this idea of promoting unilingualism, I confess that, perhaps lacking French logic, I could not see how a Commission appointed to promote bilingualism could end up by favouring the promotion of unilingualism,” Scott wrote in his journal. “Gradually it dawned on me, and I think on the others, that what Mackey meant was that unless there was a strong degree of unilingualism in the bilingual country for each language, one would eventually dominate and assimilate the other.”^{Footnote 10}

Laurendeau's view, eloquently expressed in the blue pages of the first volume of the Royal Commission report, was that the survival of French in Canada and North America depended upon a strong French-speaking society in Quebec and, as he wrote in his journal, two unilingualisms.

While Scott admired Laurendeau's independence of thought and opposition to Duplessis, he occasionally fulminated at the myths he felt that Laurendeau perpetuated about the English community: “Only in the economic area do the English have a privileged place. In … other activities, as well as in politics, it is a handicap to belong to the English minority.”^{Footnote 11}

But both men were appalled by the ignorance and prejudice they encountered toward French in Canada during the Commission's visits to Western Canada.

Both were also taken aback by the degree to which separatists were dominating public discussion in Quebec. Scott did not lose his quick wit during some of those stormy hearings.

At a meeting in Sherbrooke, a young man said that he cared nothing about the French-speaking minorities outside Quebec, that the only minority that mattered was the English-speaking minority in Quebec, and it should leave as soon as possible. “J'y suis, j'y reste” (I'm here, I'm staying), responded Scott. In the discussions in the fall of 1967, he found himself in a minority: as he put it, “the only voice for a bilingual Quebec.”

He ultimately dissented from the Commission's recommendations in Volume 4, arguing that, by recommending the working language in Quebec be French, it was contradicting its earlier rejection of a territorial solution to the language issue.

The final note that Scott struck was a pessimistic one: a 10-page, legal-sized document poignantly titled “The End of the Affair.” It is undated, but on the basis of the internal evidence it was written in 1970 before the October Crisis. Though the Commission's work was over, Scott wrote, the crisis in Quebec was not—and he warned that the recommendations could not solve all the problems of national unity. He closed “on a personal note”:

It is astonishing and also frightening for me to watch Quebec abandon so many of its ancient virtues and values in order to rush into the North American capitalist system with arms open for the embrace. The values of that system I learned to despise and reject in the 1930s. I had hoped that the Catholic tradition with its greater emphasis on social obligations would somehow mitigate the prevailing Protestant ethic of free enterprise.

It is a poignant sign of age that at 70, he nostalgically saw “virtues and values,” whereas at 33 he had denounced the Church for interpreting the Depression “as a sort of punishment from God upon greedy individuals.”^{Footnote 12}

The public sessions of the Royal Commission confirmed some of the conceptual problems in its mandate. But what emerged as the essential debate, and the source of critical tension within the Royal Commission, was the conceptual model that should be developed for Canada.

Frank Scott, on the other hand, felt that Quebec was, legally, constitutionally and practically, a bilingual province—and that bilingual status should be extended to the rest of Canada.

Both agreed that the status quo—which Pearson had described in his December 1962 speech as “an English-speaking Canada with a bilingual Quebec”—was unacceptable.

But their ultimate visions of what the future should be were quite different.

Paradoxically, both felt that they had lost. When Volume 1 was published, Laurendeau said bleakly to a colleague, “It does nothing for Quebec.”

For Scott, on the contrary, Laurendeau had been pushing for a constitutional change to give more powers to Quebec.

Scott thought this completely inappropriate, and he felt that the commissioners and the Commission's researchers were much too sympathetic to the idea of a unilingual French-speaking Quebec.

Scott would ultimately dissent from the Commission's recommendation that the language of work in Quebec be French, arguing that this was inconsistent with the earlier rejection of territorial bilingualism.

“This is exactly what I knew would happen,”^{Footnote 13} he wrote grimly in his journal.