EVE HAQUE

Multiculturalism within a Bilingual Framework:

A Retrospective

BILINGUAL, BINATIONAL, BICULTURAL: CANADIAN FOUNDING MYTHS

On March 7, 2012, the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) in Toronto held a public event
on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, the final installment in the second series of its very
popular History Wars at the ROM, which explored “some of the most provocative sub-
jects and personalities in Canadian history” (ROM 2014). This particular debate had
as its central proposition that “Canada is not Bilingual, Binational or Bicultural.” It fea-
tured Antonia Maioni, Associate Professor of Political Science at McGill University and
former Director of the McGill Centre for the Study of Canada, speaking against the
proposition; David Bercuson, Professor of History at the University of Calgary, speak-
ing in favour of the proposition; and Michael Bliss, a historian at the University of
Toronto, moderating the debate for a mostly older and white audience of roughly five
hundred people. How the arguments were framed was significant.
During the debate, Bercuson did not build his argument in favour of the propo-
sition on the basis of the “multicultural fact” of Canada, which is a common rhetor-
ical strategy these days; rather, he emphasized that most Canadians were
overwhelmingly monolingual in one of the official languages – mainly English. A
study in contrast, Maioni strongly argued that Canada was indeed bilingual, bicul-
tural, and binational and, moreover, stated emphatically that multiculturalism in
Canada does not exist in a vacuum but is associated with and rooted in the prior
existence of two distinct cultural and linguistic settings, that is, the founding cul-
tures. Notably, despite their apparently opposing viewpoints, both Bercuson and
Maioni shared a belief that Canada is a white settler society of “two founding races,”
that is, a nation founded by white English and French-speaking peoples. In this
book, I attempt to unravel how it is that this discourse about Canada came to be nor-
malized through state processes and practices.
The ROM debate idea that Canada has is at its core a dual white settler founding
nation is not an idea that is specific to academia, as shown by the public reactions to
Statistics Canada’s release of the 2011 census data on language in late 2012 (Statistics

CES Volume 46 Number 2 (2014), 119-125

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Canada 2014). Given the general interest in language issues in Canada, this data
release on language use across the country generated nationwide media coverage
and attendant commentaries. Although the data suggested an increasing presence of
immigrant languages (such as Tagalog, Cantonese, and Arabic among twenty-two
other immigrant mother tongues) in Canada, with one fifth of the population
speaking a language other than English or French in the home, the 2011 figures also
showed that the official languages remained robust with 58% of the Canadian pop-
ulation reporting English as a mother tongue, 22% reporting French as a mother
tongue and 98% stating they were able to conduct a conversation in either English
or French.
The media scrutiny and extensive public reactions to these stories, however,
focused mainly on the increase in non-official language use, generating such head-
lines as “Is Multiculturalism Stifling Bilingualism?” (Scoffield 2012). As well, reac-
tions to these stories were exemplified in online reader comments such as, “When
you are in Canada, nothing but French and English. If you dislike that go back where
you came from” (Friesen 2012). The hundreds of online comments and letters
posted in response to these stories made it obvious that for many, these figures on
language produced deep racialized anxieties about multiculturalism and its adverse
effects on the imagined nation of the two “founding races” (20). It is clear that more
than forty years after the multiculturalism policy was adopted in Canada, these pub-
lic debates, which harken back explicitly to the Royal Commission on Bilingualism
and Biculturalism (1963-1970), remain stubbornly entrenched in a binary that ulti-
mately sediments around the central question of the privileged status of the two
founding nations/cultures. This process of reification takes place most clearly in
Book I of the B and B Commission and becomes codified in the Official Languages
Act of 1969, as outlined in chapter five. A genealogy of the Royal Commission on
Bilingualism and Biculturalism demonstrates that the production of this founding
white settler duality requires both the erasure of any claims to First Nations status
for indigenous communities in Canada as well as the culturalization of difference –
as multiculture – for racialized groups, as I argue in chapter six.

THE POLITICAL CONTEXT FOR THE ROYAL COMMISSION

In a post-WWII era, where delineating difference on the basis of biological racism had
become verboten, the Commission provided the ideal public process for transforming
the racialized hierarchy embedded in the white settler national narrative onto the
terrain of culture – with language acting as a critical technology for marking cultural
difference. In the present, this racialization of cultural difference allows both for the
continued pathologization of indigenous cultures, as well as marking racialized com-
Eve Haque | 121

munities as always marginal to the nation. Ultimately, this double act of erasure and
marginalization is essential for the two founding nations white settler logic that under-
writes all contemporary claims for Canadian citizenship and belonging.
The move away from the two founding “races” expression to the emergence of
the two founding nations thesis, as it is expressed in contemporary Canadian polit-
ical life, can be traced back to the B and B Commission, which gave rise to two of
Canada’s most defining pieces of legislation: The Official Languages Act (1969) and
the Multiculturalism Policy (1971). Trudeau’s announcement of the Multicultural-
ism Policy in the House of Commons on October 8, 1971 (reformulated much later
in 1988 as the Multiculturalism Act) was a response to Book IV (The Cultural
Contribution of the Other Ethnic Groups) of the Royal Commission’s final report. In
his announcement, Trudeau explicitly coupled the Multiculturalism Policy with the
Official Languages Act of 1969 to declare that Canada was “multicultural within a
bilingual framework.” This new national formulation not only placed English and
French groups on equal footing as the dual “founders” of Canada, but did so by fore-
grounding their collective claims to national languages (that is, bilingualism) while
homogenizing and delimiting all other groups as merely cultural (that is, multicul-
tural). As well, the new formulation at worse erased and at best subordinated any
preexisting claims by indigenous communities to First Nations status by leaving
them explicitly out of this new formula for national belonging.
There have been several hundred royal commissions in Canada since
Confederation, all of which have served as platforms not only for legitimizing cer-
tain forms of knowledge in order to justify particular state policies, but also for
Canadians to debate the representation of themselves in the past, present, and
future. The federal government established the B and B Commission in the 1960s
during an historical moment when challenges to the existing Anglo-Celtic domi-
nance by racialized Others became most visible, including during the B and B’s pre-
liminary and public hearings, as detailed in chapters three and four of the book.

OPPOSITION TO THE COMMISSION: THE OTHER ETHNIC GROUPS

The end of the 1950s triggered what has become known as the Quiet Revolution in
Québec, which led to an escalation in nationalist sentiment articulated on linguistic
grounds and slowly, but inexorably, to the October crisis of 1970. The early 1960s
also saw the introduction of paradigmatic changes to immigration policy away from
explicitly race-based and preferred-nation exclusionary policies (Hawkins 1988); a
shift that although ostensibly opening up immigration to the people of the Global
South and ushering in profound changes in immigrant demographics, continued to
entrench racialized hierarchies within the nation covertly through a point system.
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The 1960s also saw the government’s attempt to force the assimilation of indige-
nous peoples through the Statement of the Government of Canada on Indian Policy
(1969) – better known as the White Paper. As the decade ended, indigenous groups
issued Citizen Plus (1970) as a direct refutation of this federal assimilative strategy.
These critical shifts in Canadian society were taking place as the B and B
Commission unfolded between 1963 through 1970, with Book IV of the final report
released in late 1970. When the formation of the B and B Commission was
announced in early 1963 by Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson, the federal govern-
ment’s primary concern with French-Canadian challenges to national unity was
clearly foregrounded in the B and B Commission’s terms of reference:

To inquire into and report upon the existing state of bilingualism and biculturalism in
Canada and to recommend what steps should be taken to develop the Canadian confed-
eration on the basis of an equal partnership between the two founding races, taking into
account the contribution made by the other ethnic groups to the cultural enrichment of
Canada and the measures that should be taken to safeguard that contribution. (Canada,
Book I, 1967, Appendix I)

Even though indigenous groups – identified as “Indians and Eskimos” throughout the
inquiry – were explicitly left out of the terms of reference and dismissed in the open-
ing pages of the first volume of the report, “since the terms of reference contain no
mention of Indians and Eskimos, we have not studied the question of Canada’s native
population” (Canada, Book I, 1969, 4), indigenous peoples nonetheless made a bid for
inclusion as the rightful First Nations of Canada by making submissions to the
Commission. At the preliminary hearings in late 1963, a representative from the
National Indian Council of Canada made an argument for indigenous peoples to have
their language rights acknowledged, “We respectfully submit that Canada is a trilingual
country … Indians possess a culture quite distinct from biculturalism” (Canada,
Preliminary Hearings, 1963, 144). As well, at the public hearings of 1965, a range of
indigenous groups challenged the limited notion of founding races in the terms of ref-
erence, and emphasized their status as the “first citizens,” therefore making them “more
Canadian than any other group that have arrived since European settlement” (Indian-
Eskimo Association of Canada 1965, 2). Indigenous groups also spoke of the threat to
their communities’ cultural survival posed by assimilation and underscored the urgent
need for indigenous language preservation and revitalization over English and French
bilingualism, “Anyone attempting to impose on us their ‘bilingualism’ means to us the
end of the culture and language of our ancestors” (Horn 1965, 17).
Those resisting being produced as “Other ethnic groups” valued primarily for
their “cultural contributions” also challenged the primacy of French and English in
the terms of reference. Ukrainians argued, for example, that this formulation estab-
Eve Haque | 123

lished a division of Canadians into first- and second-class citizens. They also argued
that they had done the labour of settling Canada – building railways, opening up
backwoods, cultivating land – and therefore also had claims to founding status:
“Canadian Ukrainian citizens feel that they too are a founding race since to a large
extent it was the Ukrainians that did the work of building the railways, and … who
found[ed] these settlements in the most inaccessible parts of Canada” (Canada,
Preliminary Hearing 1963, 220). Throughout the public hearings, most “other eth-
nic groups” spoke strongly in favour of multiculturalism and made demands for
robust multilingual – often territory-based – rights: “It is our hope, that while the
Royal Commission must address itself to a specific problem indicated by its name,
the larger frame of reference will be multilingualism and multiculturalism”
(Canadian Mennonite Association 1965, 4). Over the course of the hearings, it
became clear that there was an emerging consensus among many “other ethnic
groups” that multiculturalism was already an everyday fact of Canadian life,
“Multiculturalism has already been spontaneously adopted by the people them-
selves” (Social Study Club of Edmonton 1964, 4), and that official recognition of
only English and French in Canada would, in fact, be counter to the grounded spirit
of existing everyday practices of multiculturalism.
Indigenous communities and almost all of the “other ethnic groups” spoke
clearly in favour of full recognition of a robust set of linguistic and cultural rights for
their communities. However, even in the aftermath of the extensive cross-country
hearings, the Commission still managed to foreground French and English rights
over all others. In order to accomplish this, the B and B Commission required a
strategy that dismissed what indigenous communities had said at the hearings and
instead used government-produced research, reports, and expert consultations in a
project of colonial governance that pathologized indigenous issues to the extent that
they could be set outside the inquiry, “The social and economic problems of the
Indians are so great, deep and bitter that the cultural and language problems must
wait until they realize them” (Varjassy 1964, 3). In this way, government reports
could officially extend the frame of colonial paternalism and perpetually defer cul-
tural and linguistic equality. This move was an erasure that could silence any coun-
terclaims by indigenous communities and reinforce the myth of terra nullius that
undergirds indigenous dispossession and the English and French settlers’ claim of
“founding” status. Thus, the principal challenge to a bicultural notion of founding
nations from the First Nations could be discounted and the determining omissions
in the terms of reference could be affirmed.
As I found in my research into the archives of the B and B Commission, claims
by multicultural groups for a robust set of multicultural and multilingual rights
were also marginalized through a process that transposed racial and ethnic distinc-
124 | Canadian Ethnic Studies/Études ethniques au Canada

tions in the terms of reference onto linguistic divisions. Specifically, the

Commission’s final report clarified that although the life of English and French cul-
tures required the safeguarding of the English and French languages, in the case of
multicultural groups, the culture of their forebears could be preserved even when
the language was no longer spoken. This critical disparity in the right to language
would reinstall the hierarchy of difference from the terms of reference onto the ter-
rain of language and culture. The fact of multicultural diversity could be acknowl-
edged, even as the dominance of two white settler cultures were reified and codified
in legislation. Thus, although Trudeau would announce multiculturalism as a set of
individual rights, he would do so “within a bilingual framework” that would main-
tain and affirm collective rights for English and French and entrench a critical dif-
ference between the rights of multicultural groups and those accorded to the
“founding races.” Ultimately, Trudeau’s policy of multiculturalism was very different
from the substantive notion of multiculturalism – with a robust protection of mul-
tilingual rights – that had been advanced by multicultural communities throughout
the B and B Commission.

THE B AND B COMMISSION TODAY

In this present moment, the B and B Commission’s legacy finds expression in the dif-
ferent levels of rights entrenched in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms,
where references to multicultural and indigenous rights are located under the General
section; a section which serves mainly to aid in the interpretation of rights set out in
the rest of the Charter. Thus, individualized multicultural rights are located as an ane-
mic interpretive clause in section 27 of the Charter, and section 25 is an interpretative
clause that neither creates nor constitutionalizes indigenous rights (section 35 which
extends more direct constitutional protections is outside of the Charter). These are in
stark contrast to the robust set of protections and collective rights for English and
French that are outlined in sections 16 through to 23 of the Charter.
To bring this discussion full circle, it is no wonder then that a 2012 public debate
at the ROM on the nature of Canadian citizenship and belonging could remain fixed
around the question of the two founding nations, since the repetitive double act of
erasure and marginalization remains essential to the assertion of a national identity
binary: bilingual, bicultural, and binational. As a genealogy of the B and B
Commission reveals, there is a deeply intertwined relationship between the margin-
alization and hierarchicalization of multiculturalized and racialized groups and the
ongoing erasure of indigenous communities, which underwrites the maintenance of
a white settler dual nationalism that separates out these groups as fundamentally
unequal to the founding nations. Therefore, any critical scholarship on Canadian
Eve Haque | 125

white settler colonialism which aims to disrupt this repetitive binaristic tic – exempli-
fied in the types of public debate on display at the ROM and in national newspaper
coverage of multiculturalism and language issues – requires a concurrent considera-
tion of these processes of marginalization and erasure if it is not to miss the precise
operation of the dual white setter logic in Canada.

REFERENCES
Canada. Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism. 1963. “Preliminary Hearing.” Transcript.
Ottawa: Queen’s Printer.
———. 1967. Book I: The Official Languages. Ottawa: Queen’s Printer.
Canadian Mennonite Association. 1965. “Brief to the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and
Biculturalism.” Winnipeg.
Friesen, Joe. 2012. Allophones on the Cusp of Outnumbering Francophones in Canada. Globe and Mail,
October 23. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/allophones-on-the-cusp-of-outnum-
bering-francophones-in-canada/article4630383/.
Haque, Eve. 2012. Multiculturalism within a bilingual framework: Language, race and belonging in Canada.
Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Hawkins, Freda. 1988. Canada and Immigration: Public Policy and Public Concern. 2nd ed. Montreal:
McGill-Queen’s University Press.
History Wars. 2012. “Canada is not bilingual, binational or bicultural.” March 7th. Royal Ontario
Museum, Toronto.
Horn, K.-T. 1965. “Brief to the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism.” Toronto.
Indian-Eskimo Association of Canada. 1965. “A Brief to the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and
Biculturalism.” Toronto.
ROM. 2014. History Wars at the ROM. http://www.rom.on.ca/en/collections-research/rom-channel/his-
tory-wars-canada-not-bilingual-binational-or-bicultural-part-4-4.
Scoffield, Heather. 2012. Is Multiculturalism Stifling Bilingualism? The Toronto Star, October 23. October
23. http://www.thestar.com/ news/canada/2012/10/23/census_2011_is_multiculturalism_stifling_
bilingualism.html.
Scott, M. 2012. Census 2011: StatsCan does away with ‘francophone,’ ‘anglophone,’ and ‘allophone.’ The
Gazette, October 26.
Social Study Club of Edmonton. 1964. “Brief to the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and
Biculturalism.” Edmonton.
Statistics Canada. 2014. Linguistic Characteristics of Canadians. http://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-
recensement/2011/as-sa/98-314-x/98-314-x2011001-eng.cfm.
Varjassy, I. M. 1964. November 20−22. “Confidential Distribution: The Ontario Conference of the Indian
Eskimo Association,” London, ON, Library and Archives Canada, RG 33, Series 80, vol. 119, file 537E.

EVE HAQUE is Associate Professor in the Department of Languages, Literatures and

Linguistics at York University. Her research and teaching interests include multicul-
turalism and language policy, with a focus on the regulation of racialized
im/migrants in white settler societies. She is the author of Multiculturalism within a
bilingual framework: Language, race and belonging in Canada (University of Toronto
Press, 2012). She has published in such journals as Social Identities, Journal of
Multilingual and Multicultural Development, Pedagogy, and Culture and Society.