When it comes to French, Conservative candidates stumble

There was a time, not quite a million years ago, when no one worried whether the leaders of Canada’s national political parties could speak French.

Sometimes they could, as when the leader of the Liberal party happened to be from Quebec (Wilfrid Laurier, Louis St-Laurent). But most of the time, the situation was as it was at the beginning of the 1960s, when all four party leaders — John Diefenbaker (Progressive Conservative), Lester Pearson (Liberal), Tommy Douglas (CCF/ NDP) and Robert Thompson (Social Credit) — were unilingual.

Things began to change, beginning with the election of the first Pearson Liberal government in 1963. One of the new prime minister’s first acts was to create the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism.

The B&B commission led to introduction of the Official Languages Act, to the expansion of bilingual services offered by the federal public service, and to a new public awareness that Canada is a bilingual country — and a realization that this fact should be reflected in its political leadership.

If there were any doubt of that, it was dispelled by the election of Pierre Trudeau in 1968 and his leadership of the Liberals for the next 15 years. There was no going back to unilingualism.

Today, most Canadians, even if they cannot speak both languages, feel their prime minister should be able to function in French and in English.

Which brings us, by a roundabout route, to last week’s French “debate” among the four candidates for the leadership of the Conservative Party of Canada. It was a partyproduced encounter in which the candidates were given advance notice of the questions and time to draft replies and have them translated into French before reading them to the cameras.

Even so, the audience-free event produced a couple of surprises. The first was the “chippiness” (a word deployed by several post-debate sages) exhibited by front-runners Erin O’Toole and Peter MacKay, who took turns shouting over each other and accusing the other fellow of lying.

The second was the relative proficiency of MacKay’s French. He is not fluent. His French seems somewhat better than Andrew Scheer’s but short of Stephen Harper’s. There is no way MacKay could hold his own against Justin Trudeau or Bloc leader Yves-François Blanchet; he might want to call in sick on the day of the French debate in the next election.

But on Wednesday night he was the best of the bunch. O’Toole made himself understood. Derek Sloan, the Conservative MP from Eastern Ontario, struggled to read his lines. Leslyn Lewis, a Toronto lawyer, was pathetic. (She was much better the next night in the English debate where her passion shone through.)

The party’s inability to find even one acceptable candidate from the west probably won’t hurt in its Alberta-Saskatchewan redoubt, but its failure to find anyone who is at ease in French, if not from Quebec, creates a serious obstacle in that province. It is hard to image MacKay or O’Toole wooing seats away from Trudeau or Blanchet.

(The party’s) failure to find anyone who is at ease in French, if not from Quebec, creates a serious obstacle in that province

Thursday’s English debate was a tame affair — no chippiness, no shouting, no accusations of prevarication. In fact, not much of anything.

MacKay and O’Toole agreed they love their country. They agreed they would rather fight Justin Trudeau than insult each other, and they did slap the prime minister around a bit.

Each declared a Conservative government led by him- or herself would do a better job of managing the pandemic and running the country than the Trudeau Liberals. Just how they proposed to accomplish either was not immediately apparent.

If the devil is in the detail, the front-runners weren’t about to let that devil loose.

The other two candidates, both social conservatives, offered some mild distraction from the MacKay/ O’Toole-inspired tedium. Derek Sloan promised he would pull Canada out of the Paris climate accord, defund the World Health Organization, regulate abortion — and call Donald Trump in November to congratulate him on his re-election as president.

Now, why hasn’t anyone else thought of that?