Kelden Formosa: The French are basically right about this one

If Quebec voted differently, would Western conservatives be so resistant to the place of the French language?

(Former Air Canada CEO Michael Rousseau.)

The French are basically right about this one, folks. They’re not wrong to be upset that the CEO of Air Canada recorded his condolence video in English only, and they’re certainly not wrong to insist that the rest of us take bilingualism seriously.

The controversy hits at two levels. The first is tonal. A common view goes like this: the fate of the two pilots is horrific, so how could you be going on about the language in a video at a time like this?

There’s something to this, in the sense that few arguments about how we live have much to say in the face of a seemingly senseless death. When something like this happens, in a foreign country, tied up in things we can’t control, like how well an airport was run, it’s natural to reach for the things we can argue about, even if they’re smaller. We should at least know the names of the two young pilots: Mackenzie Gunther of Peterborough, Ontario, 24, and Antoine Forest of Couteau-du-Lac, Quebec, 30. Caelum serenum tibi sit et requiescas in pace, gentlemen. Reading about you, it seems like you were among the best of us.

But the tonal point goes both ways. When we were all still checking our phones anxiously to see if the accident might have affected our loved ones, Air Canada brass were putting out an update and condolence video that featured only two words in the primary language of the city to which the flight was going: Montreal.

How would Vancouverites have felt had the shoe been on the other foot, and, God forbid, a San Francisco-Vancouver flight had been involved in a deadly accident, and then the CEO had delivered a whole video with only two words in English? This isn’t just about an insult to language rights; it’s also about how we would want to be spoken to when we’re scared for our loved ones.

Air Canada executives should have known better. If the CEO can’t speak French, get someone else on staff to record a similar video in French for the francophone audience. It wasn’t hard. It was a stupid oversight. The CEO’s resignation seems like an overreaction, as this would likely have just blown over in a week or two, but the initial mistake was just that: a mistake.

But the second level of the controversy is the broader, policy-oriented one. Our country isn’t as French as it used to be, especially in the West, and there’s an assorted pile of resentments among both our major linguistic communities. Here, the picture is more complex.

I’m an anglophone, but I had the chance to enroll in “middle immersion” starting in Grade Five at my school in Toronto. Everyone knows this is a version of private school on the public dime, and a form of streaming for stronger students. Not terrible, as the evidence on streaming is mixed, though largely positive on some metrics, but it’s open to some criticism from the more egalitarian among us. And that chance, a stroke of luck, opened a world of new opportunities, notably my first real introduction to politics as the least bilingual of the 40 House of Commons pages in my first year of university.

That’s where my French really took off. The House of Commons is a genuinely bilingual working environment, with a large overrepresentation of Franco-Ontarian and Quebec staff, so there were all sorts of chances to practise French, to actually speak the language. It was great for me, but I can see why it bothers so many people who’ve never been given opportunities like that.

Growing up in Toronto and now living out west for more than a decade, it’s pretty rare for an anglophone to have the chance to pick up French without a lengthy, dedicated effort, usually in school and then through immersion elsewhere. It’s just not the language of everyday life out here for the vast majority of people.

So it’s no wonder that many anglophones looked at Air Canada CEO Michael Rousseau and saw something of themselves in his plaintive apology: “Despite many lessons over several years, unfortunately, I am still unable to express myself adequately in French”. Though this excuse is tempered by his 20-year stint in Montreal. Former Conservative Party interim leader Candice Bergen gave voice to a similar frustration, tweeting that she was “tired that a few elites (in Ontario, primarily) get to tell the 80% of Canadians who don’t speak French fluently that we need to sit on the sidelines”.

It’s reasonable to feel annoyed that your career prospects are capped by your language skills, especially when there are so few ways to improve them naturally in your everyday life. But even here, the point is overstated. The vast majority of federal government jobs in anglophone regions do not require French fluency. Jobs that do are typically Ottawa-based, where learning serviceable French is indeed possible. While the Trudeau-era move to appoint only bilingual Supreme Court justices was a step too far, that’s not really in the cards for most of us, and it’s perhaps the 34th most objectionable thing about that increasingly activist court. Plus, the unilingual anglophone has a heck of an advantage in the private economy compared to the unilingual francophone, which offsets his slight disadvantage in getting jobs in the upper floors of Gatineau’s Portage buildings. The views from the top of Bay Street and the Bow Tower more than make up for it.

To Bergen’s broader point, that Ontario elites are rude to most Canadians: Yes, they are, and it’s bad. When they demean or disempower people outside their narrow class, we should criticize them, even when they use French-language concerns as a smokescreen, as in the new Supreme Court appointment rules. But in this case, just wanting a French condolence video, and in most cases where bilingualism is part of life, there’s very little practical harm done to anglophones.

I’ve given the upset Anglo much of his due above. The remaining objections to bilingualism are familiar: it costs too much, it’s irrelevant in a multicultural country, and, if we’re honest, we’re just annoyed with Quebec for making bad choices.

But believing in this country, wanting it to exist long into the future, is worth a bit of translation cost. Loving Canada is meaningless unless it means loving the Canada that was actually handed down to us: a fascinating British-French hybrid with a complex history of encounter and integration with other peoples, Indigenous and immigrant, in the context of our bicultural founding — in canoes, cattle drives, and committee rooms from sea to sea. You don’t have to love Canada, but if you do, you have to love what it is and has been, including its foundational languages and cultures. That doesn’t mean you must learn French, but it does mean you have to take the rights and feelings of French speakers seriously, especially when what they’re asking for comes at no great cost.

Ultimately, for most western conservatives, I suspect the political choices of Quebec are the real issue. If Quebec was bleu, we’d have fewer issues. Fair enough.

From the outside, much of French Canada’s modern history seems like a story of replacing the tried and true things that got it through two-hundred years of Anglo domination, notably large families and a strong Catholic devotional life, with a fixation on enforcing an imported secularism and maintaining a visage linguistique (“a linguistic surface”), if only that. Poor, or, in some cases, bespoke management of Quebec’s natural resources has left the province less wealthy, so it draws heavily on equalization, and there’s nothing that gets a prairie conservative more annoyed than having to pay the bills of people who vote Liberal, even if he himself lives in a town named, say, Lacombe, after one of the great French founders of modern Alberta.

But in a country we love, the bonds we have with one another should go deeper and last longer than our most recent economic or cultural annoyances. I don’t mean to pick on Lacombe, a town I really like, but it would be odd to live there and not respect the French Catholic missionary priest for whom it is named, a man so revered as a mediator that his body was buried in Cree territory north of Edmonton while his heart was buried in Blackfoot territory south of Calgary. The same goes for many of the good, rock-ribbed conservative parts of the Canadian West, whose heritage is far more French than we might remember today. Bilingualism doesn’t just honour our cousins back east, it honours where we come from, who we are, and it points us towards where we ought to be going, a country that says, “I remember, je me souviens,” even as it moves forward.

Kelden Formosa is an elementary school teacher in Calgary. He has an M.Ed. from the University of Notre Dame. His writing has appeared in The Hub.