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Canada’s capital city should be bilingual

Canada as a country with two constitutionally entrenched official languages, a bilingual Parliament, a bilingual federal government and bilingual federal courts, should also have a bilingual capital city.

Would John A. Macdonald, Georges-Etienne Cartier, and the 34 other Fathers of Confederation who attended the weeklong Charlottetown Conference, the three weeklong Quebec Conference in 1864 ( known as 'the meeting that made Canada,') and the London Conference in 1866—have proposed or knowingly accepted that the capital of the new country called Canada, would be an officially unilingual English city? Of course not.Photograph courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

BY JEAN T. FOURNIER

April 17, 2017

Canada as a country with two constitutionally entrenched official languages, a bilingual Parliament, a bilingual federal government and bilingual federal courts, should also have a bilingual capital city. Seems simple and clear enough in theory, does it not? But practice is an entirely differ...

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