Bilingual today, united tomorrow: Canadian federalism and the development of the Official Languages in Education Program, 1968--1984

The language policies adopted by the government of Pierre Elliott Trudeau have been widely criticized within the political science community. This criticism is rooted in the failure of these policies to promote a Canadian identity rooted in a French Quebec-English Canada duality, as demanded by Quebec nationalists. A closer examination of the development of these language policies, particularly as they pertain to education programs, suggests a revised interpretation. Far from being a failure, the Canadian government's Official Languages in Education Program (OLEP), launched in 1970, threw a lifeline to French-Canadian and Acadian minority communities, developing their minority language education systems, and providing them with much-needed time and funds to regroup, after they lost the traditional supports of the Catholic Church and the Quebec government. To promote individual bilingualism, the OLEP's second language initiatives led to significant expansion of French second language instruction, and the proliferation of French immersion programs. Through its support to provincial education systems, the OLEP also laid the groundwork for section 23 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which guaranteed minority official language education rights. Drawing primarily on archival materials from six provinces (Alberta, Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia), the federal government, and a host of lobby groups involved in the process, as well as interviews with a number of key civil servants, politicians and lobbyists, this thesis reconstructs Ottawa's strategy to promote official languages in education. It shows how the OLEP, a program designed primarily by the Canadian government and implemented by the provinces, was shaped by debates over the nature of the Canadian federal system. Initially designed as an intrastate program, a concerted drive for more provincial autonomy in the 1970s (and a concomitant interstate vision of Canadian federalism) threatened Ottawa's control over the direction of the OLEP. Through a combination of pressure applied by the embedded state, via supportive lobby groups and civil servants, and a concerted constitutional strategy, the Canadian government was able to rebalance the forces of intrastate and interstate federalism, defend its vision of a pan-Canadian English-French linguistic duality, combat Quebec separatism, and instil official bilingualism into the discourse of Canadian identity