Provincial legislatures In 1969, the law was adopted with all-party support in the
House of Commons of Canada. Despite this, there was not universal support for the law. The premiers of the three Prairie provinces requested, early in 1969, that the Official Languages Bill be referred to the
Supreme Court of Canada to determine its constitutionality. They maintained, along with JT Thorson, the former president of the
Exchequer Court of Canada, that the bill was outside the powers of the Parliament of Canada. The reference to the court was never made, but the legal question was resolved in 1974, when the Supreme Court ruled, in
Jones v. Attorney General of New Brunswick, that the subject matter of the bill was within federal jurisdiction. In subsequent decades the response from provincial governments to the example set by the federal government has been mixed: •
New Brunswick, which is home to Canada's second-largest French-speaking minority population, adopted the federal government policy and adopted its own
Official Languages Act on April 18, 1969. The bilingual status of New Brunswick was strengthened in 1993 by
the addition of section 16.1 to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. •
Ontario, which is the home to Canada's largest French-speaking minority, opted instead to enact a law (the
French Language Services Act) which provides for services of the provincial government to be made available in certain geographically designated regions, but which does not give the French language either a symbolic or an authoritative status as an equal "official" language of Ontario. However, the English and French versions of statutes and regulations that are enacted or made in both languages are equally authoritative. •
Manitoba, which is home to Canada's third-largest French-speaking minority, refused to overturn its ban on the use of French in both the provincial legislature and its courts (which had been in effect since 1890), until it was forced to do so in 1985 by a ruling by the
Supreme Court of Canada (
Reference re Manitoba Language Rights) that the province was under a constitutional obligation to enact laws in French as well as in English. •
Quebec, which is home to an English-speaking minority of over half a million, had traditionally been the only province which was generous in its treatment of its minority-language population, and for this reason had been cited by the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism as the model to be emulated by other provinces. But in the 1970s, the provincial legislature adopted two laws, the
Official Language Act (also known as "Bill 22") and the
Charter of the French Language (also known as "Bill 101"), reducing the access of Quebecers to English-language services, preventing immigrants and Francophones from enrolling their children in English schools, requiring that French be made the language of the workplace, and restricting the use of English on commercial signs.
Public reactions Public support for bilingual services had dramatically increased between the mid-1960s and the end of the 1970s. There was no direct polling on the popularity of the
Official Languages Act itself at the time, but poll data on related questions gives an indication of a significant shift in the attitudes of English-speaking Canadians. A 1965 poll showed that 17% of Canadians living outside Quebec favored the use of public funds to finance French-language schools. This proportion had risen to 77% by 1977 (albeit in response to a slightly different question about support for provincial governments offering services in French "where possible"). Within Quebec, changes to the treatment of French-speakers within the federal public service were met with approval mixed with skepticism that this actually helped the unilingual French-speaking majority of Quebecers, who continued to be excluded from all federal jobs designated "bilingual", since by definition a "bilingual" job requires the use of English. However, the changes found some opposition in
English Canada.
Toronto Telegram columnist Braithwaither sums up the position of the opponents of the bill like this: "We are not afraid of any aspect of the language bill, we simply regard it as unnecessary, politically-motivated, costly to implement, divisive, and, as it affects the non-English, non-French third of the population, wholly discriminatory." As per the bill, some positions in the public sector were designated as bilingual. At the implementation of the bill, if a bilingual position was held by a unilingual anglophone, this person was allowed to keep their position on the condition that they attempted to learn French, and all subsequent holders of this position must be bilingual. Under these circumstances, there were fears that, because of the higher rate of bilingualism among Francophones, people whose first official language is French would become overrepresented in the public sector. However, this has not become the case. The ratio of French first official language speakers to English first official language speakers in the public sector is almost the same as in the general population. At any rate, the adoption of official bilingualism at the federal level did almost nothing to slow the rise of the sovereignist movement. The nationalist
Parti Québécois made its first significant electoral breakthrough less than a year after the
Official Languages Act was adopted, winning 23% of the vote in Quebec's
1970 provincial election and replacing the
Union Nationale as the main electoral vehicle for
Quebec nationalism. Six years later, the Parti Québécois came to power in the
1976 provincial election. == Failure to implement all provisions of the
Official Languages Act ==