Voicing his dissent on language
If the federal NDP caucus splits over the issue of official bilingualism, of all things, it might look inevitable in hindsight. For now, though, it’s a rather novel objection born of a private member’s bill that went down to defeat last month.
NDP MP François Choquette’s bill would have mandated that Supreme Court judges be fluently bilingual. (Former NDP MP Yvon Godin introduced a similar bill in 2011.) But NDP MP Roméo Saganash, a Cree who represents the riding of AbitibiBaie-James-Nunavik-Eeyou, isn’t on board.
“The ability to speak several languages, that’s good, there’s merit there, but with this bill we’re only talking about English and French,” he told Hélène Buzzetti of Le Devoir this week. “Why aren’t we talking about Indigenous languages that have existed for 5,000, 7,000, 10,000 years? We are perpetuating colonialism with this bill.”
“All Indigenous people in Canada speak one official language or the other, English or French,” Saganash argued. “To exclude that part of the population from the possibility of sitting on the Supreme Court has always seemed unacceptable to me.”
Saganash seems to be an army of one, at this point. Fourteen NDP MPs did not vote on Choquette’s bill; but four of them voted on the previous and subsequent items on the agenda, the sharp-eyed Buzzetti noted. Her attempts to chase them down for an explanation — almost literally in some cases, by the sounds of it — were fruitless. And one can understand why. Keeping the NDP’s fascinating coalition of champagne socialists, the working poor, prairie populists, trade unionists and Quebec nationalists happy is like a plate-spinning act.
Rock-ribbed support for official bilingualism was NDP doctrine long before the 2005 Sherbrooke Declaration — the party’s direct appeal to soft nationalist voters who had been parked with the Bloc Québécois. Bilingualism is bloody serious business in Quebec. If Saganash’s opinions took hold, one of those plates could be in serious jeopardy.
But, well, what can you say? When you’re right, you’re right.
Whether or not it offends you, there’s not much that’s more literally colonialist than privileging the languages of Wolfe and Montcalm over those of the people who were here before us — and privileging fluency in both even more.
And there’s no question whatsoever that the bilingualism requirement would make it more difficult to achieve another long-stated goal of many progressives in Ottawa: to appoint the most outstanding Indigenous jurist on offer to the Supreme Court of Canada.
The 2011 National Household Survey found 17.9 per cent of Canadians who selfidentified as non-Aboriginal claimed to speak both of Canada’s official languages. Among those who self-identified as Aboriginal, the figure was 10.5 per cent: 17.3 per cent among those who self-identify as Métis, 7.0 per cent among First Nations, 6.2 per cent among Inuit.
That’s a significant narrowing of the potential talent pool along purely linguistic lines. And with a government committed to enacting all of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s recommendations, several of which concern respect and increased resources for aboriginal languages, that could conceivably get very awkward.
But of course, the push for fluently bilingual Supreme Court judges is an equity nightmare across the board. Except in Quebec, bilingualism rates are markedly lower among immigrants: in the rest of Canada just six per cent of foreign-born Canadians reported French-English bilingualism, compared to 11 per cent among those born in Canada, again according to the 2011 NHS.
Considerably fewer visible minority Canadians are bilingual, according to a 2007 report from the Office of the Commissioner of Official Languages. The 2016 Census found that 86 per cent of bilingual Canadians live in Quebec, Ontario and New Brunswick, versus just 64 per cent of the total population.
Saganash takes a narrow, specific perspective in criticizing a bilingualism requirement for the Supreme Court. But the wider, general perspective is just as valid: it’s a dumb, discriminatory, pointless idea. There is no compelling evidence at all that a lack of French-English bilingualism has negatively impacted the court’s decision-making.
There is no earthly reason to impose such an artificial barrier to a more diverse and representative Supreme Court except as a symbolic gesture of a very specific kind of inclusivity. Saganash has usefully highlighted one of the many ways it could in fact hamper many other kinds of inclusivity.
And if it makes life a bit difficult for his fellow MPs in Ottawa, all the better.