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Commentary: On the difficulties of being bicultural GEORGE FERGUSON Tuning in to my television set one evening recently, I was fascinated to hear my old friend, John W. Pickersgill explaining to a CTV interviewer, Charles King, that while not bilingual, he could definitely proclaim himself to be bicultural. There has been much almost indiscriminate use of the two terms during the nearly ten years which cover the famous "B. and B." Royal Commission 's active life. The subject has been "news" for all that time and I wish it even longer life and a fruitful future in the years to come. Mr. Pickersgill, however, deserves a special place in my private pantheon, for he is the first man I have ever heard admitting his biculturalism, and indeed, obviously glorying in it. So far as bilingual Canadians go, the woods are full of them, though I hope and pray they will be still more crowded in the years to come. It may well be that they will become the saviors of Canada, for it has been a shocking thing, looking back with hindsight, that for so many years we EnglishCanadians considered that bilingualism could be safely left to our French-Canadian friends to cultivate. Our concept of nationalism, based on a rugged unilingualism, in practice involved only raising our voices when faced by the need to express ourselves in anything but English - and the louder, the better, In extreme cases, when the difficulty of getting ourselves understood remained, some of us tried speaking English with what we fondly imagined was a French accent, even resorting now and again to hand gestures and shoulder-shrugging. This period in our national story is rapidly drawing to a close. Young English-speaking Canadians apparently lack their fathers' confidence that only Quebecers had to learn the two languages necessary for a career in politics - to say Journal of Canadian Studies nothing of job requirements in the civil service. The younger generation is taking the new conditions in its stride, and is finding it in no way irksome. In due course, the day will come when a good working knowledge of French will be taken for granted in Ottawa, and the existing disquiet will become a thing of the past. This is certain. The rare and uncertain school-boy French of Mackenzie King, of John Diefenbaker and Lester Pearson will no longer be heard in the House of Commons . Its day is done, and it is to the everlasting credit of Mr. Pearson that it has come as fast as it has. To John Diefenbaker belongs the substantial credit of bringing into force a system of simultaneous translations in Parliament, but this was obviously a stopgap . In for a penny, in for a pound, our politically minded men have decided, as witness the progress made by such figures as Stanfield and Mitchell Sharp who have out-stripped Diefenbaker and Pearson in their knowledge and capacity for speaking French, to say nothing of John Turner, who can, and does, beat them both. There is perhaps a small handful of others in his class whose native tongue is English but, by and large, by far the greater number of bilingual M.P.'s who are fluent in both official languages are natives of Quebec. This has been true through all the years that lie between Confederation and today. More than this, since Confederation, most of the men holding important cabinet posts came from English-speaking Canada. The exceptions to this general rule are few and far between. Everybody knows the name and achievements of Sir George Etienne Cartier, Macdonald's great colleague from Quebec, most people remember the names of Mackenzie King's great Minister of Justice Ernest Lapointe and his own successor, Louis St. Laurent. But who remembers a single name of any of Diefenbaker's Quebec colleagues, or until its final re-organization the names of any of Pearson's French-Canadian cabinet colleagues? The single excep63 tion is Maurice Sauve. There were good reasons for these glaring gaps. Federal politics in Quebec had gone into eclipse. Men of talent were no longer attracted to Ottawa. Their place was taken by time-servers who all knew...

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