English Canadians will be upset to discover that Quebec’s separatists are unhappy with Mark Carney. Not only did he invite that cruel personification of centuries-long oppression — King Charles — to deliver a speech from the throne, but they have also determined that his French proficiency has not come along nearly as quickly as it should’ve over the past few months.
It is difficult to feel much sympathy. For one, the man has been busy. Of greater significance, however, is that little fact that just this spring the residents of Quebec seeped towards their polling stations and voted en masse for Carney’s Liberal Party. This included flipping seats in deepest, darkest Quebec from the resident nationalist party, leading one Liberal to say, “This wasn’t in our forecast. We didn’t think [we] would win.”
During the campaign, Conservatives were understandably offended that Mark Carney’s almost pompous fondness for the motherland (he has since decreed that all staff in his office have to wear neckties and use British spelling) came to no electoral effect in Quebec. This was a leader who held a British passport, who flew to England to meet with the King in the precious days before the election started, who confused Quebec’s sensitive cultural events, and who shunned the French-language TVA debate because, well, he didn’t speak enough French. Not that it mattered. Fear of Donald Trump, it turns out, is a more potent force than any romantic pursuit of self-governance. The usual convention of electing a Prime Minister who grasps Quebec’s eccentric and insular culture was simply overlooked.
Mark Carney does speak a manner of French, but it is a type of Ottawa patois that would have waiters in Paris or Montreal indignantly deliver an English menu to the table. Unique only to Canada’s National Capital Region, it is a French where the accent is blatantly North American, but where English loan words are discouraged; where the rolled “r” is disguised with a guttural sound (similar to how a Liverpudlian would say chicken), which is solely deployed in meetings where everyone would much rather be speaking English, but government policy requires otherwise. Like so many other talented young bureaucrats, learning French eases the way for promotion, and Mark Carney certainly had a vertiginous ascent — rising from a senior associate deputy minister to the “rockstar” Governor of the Bank of Canada in four short years.
True bilingualism is now only found in Ottawa and Montreal, allowing the latter to exert an inordinate influence over the country’s direction
This curious dialect is a product of manufactured government policy; namely, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s 1969 Official Languages Act, which required the work of the federal public service to be conducted in both English and French. Before this, Ottawa was a thoroughly unilingual capital. Pierre Trudeau, then working as a junior official in the Privy Council Office, would recall the “constant jokes about how you couldn’t speak French. If you were writing a memo to your colleague who is equally French, you couldn’t write it in French … It was annoying.”
After the mortal scare of two independence referendums, official bilingualism has achieved a fragment of its ambition in that French Canadians now feel welcome in Ottawa. For a country which has always been a stable, yet loveless, marriage between the two founding groups, this is enough of a justification. Yet any policy that forces French onto a population where vast cohorts would never organically come into contact with the language, inevitably produces clumsy results.
It has, for one, made the government hysterically inefficient. Imagine the dysfunction of the British state, and then force officials (usually English-speaking) to write everything again in French. It has also dramatically reduced the talent pool from which the federal government can recruit. Only 18 per cent of Canada’s 42 million souls are considered bilingual, yet all senior public servants, ministers, and executives of crown corporations should speak French. All hell can break loose when their deficiencies are discovered. Take, for instance, Air Canada’s CEO, who “sparked an outcry” when he delivered a 26-minute speech, of which only 20 seconds were in that language, leading to an official investigation. A few weeks later, the CEO solemnly told reporters his lessons had begun.
Official bilingualism has always been a utopian idea. From Atlantic to Pacific, Trudeau Sr. envisioned Canadians as Tolstoy characters — switching effortlessly between the two languages over dinner. Yet for a man who once described sharing a border with the United States as “sleeping with an elephant,” it is telling how he failed to see that the sheer force of American culture would make the democratisation of French impossible. Now, even Quebec frets about the survival of its language, creating such strict requirements for immigrants that they’ve been known to reject French citizens for being unable to demonstrate adequate French-language proficiency.
True bilingualism is now only found in Ottawa and Montreal, allowing the latter to exert an inordinate influence over the country’s direction. This effortless bilingualism, where no one can truly tell which province you’re from (just as received pronunciation emerged in the British Isles), has become a signal that your blood runs blue. It also happens to unlock any patronage appointment the federal government oversees. Justin Trudeau was fortunate enough to speak like this, attending elite institutions like Collège Jean-de-Brébeuf and McGill University, where students are encouraged to flirt with the two languages. Mark Carney attended St. Francis Xavier High School in Edmonton, Alberta.
Over the past week, Maclean’s Magazine reported that Carney is “casually contemptuous of the Trudeau government.” One wonders whether this scholarship boy, who enforces a strict dress code, and who refuses to spell in American English, may just be ever so slightly resentful of what his level of French proficiency must mean.
