Multiculturalism within a Bilingual Framework: Language, Race and Belonging to Canada by Eve Haque (review)

This book gives a detailed account of how the Canadian 1969 Official Languages Act and the 1971 Multiculturalism policy emerged out of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism that took place across Canada in the 1960s, better known as the B and B Commission. The author attributes the creation of the B and B Commission to three mean reasons: “the radical changes taking place in immigration policy, the federal government’s attempts to abolish the Indian Act, and the rise of Quebec’s linguistic nationalism …” (31). In her discussion, the author argues that ethnic groups other than the majority Anglophone and Francophone communities, despite the fact that they were invited to participate in the discussion, were in fact excluded from the decision-making process—as in the case of the Indigenous groups. These groups lacked political power vis-à-vis the Anglophones and Francophones, considered, in the official discourse, as the “founding races” in Canada.

Using the methodological approach of Foucault’s genealogy, where history is not understood as a continuity of events, but rather as “oriented to revealing discontinuities” (26), the author undertook a thorough analysis of key documents from the B and B Commission—the preliminary hearings and report, the public hearings and the research conducted in the context of the Commission, Book I on the official languages, and Book IV on the cultural contributions of the other ethnic groups. Her analysis focused on the role played by ethnic and indigenous groups in the work of the B and B Commission.

Written in a very accessible style, the book explores various key debates that took place during the B and B Commission work. The first debate concerned the use of the word “race” to define the country’s founding groups (Anglophones and Francophones). The term of reference “founding races” was highly criticized by many. The word “race” was a source of misunderstanding, even though the Commission tried to present it as a synonym for “nation.” Interestingly enough, in the French versions of the commission’s documents, this word was not used and the “founding races” were rather named “les deux peuples fondateurs.” The author illustrates this debate by looking specifically at the contributions of key individuals from the Commission, as well as at those of influential representatives of diverse groups who did not agree with this term, although for different reasons.

The major contribution of this book is to draw attention to the profound contradiction regarding the importance of the language in the maintenance of a culture. The B and B Commission argued that in the context of the two “founding races,” language was crucial in the building of the Canadian nation. When it came to the other ethnic groups, however, language was claimed to be secondary to culture. It was implicitly understood that in order to integrate, members of other ethnic groups would need to use either English or French at least in the public sphere, and that use of their mother tongue was a private matter. This discourse constructed the rationale for the creation of the Official Languages Act in 1969. “Race” lost its importance to language and culture, which became two major notions in the discourse of the Commission. The weight given to language in the context of the founding peoples exacerbated the power imbalance between the majority and the minorities. Consequently, Canada remained a White-settler society.

The author provides a solid argumentation when discussing the power imbalance between the founding people and the other ethnic groups, which resulted in two important federal legislations: the Canadian Official Languages Act and the policy on Multiculturalism within a bilingual framework. As presented by the author, language for other ethnic groups continued to be treated as a matter of the private sphere. In the case of the founding peoples, however, language was at the very core of the debate. The stakes were much higher...