Bilingual Rule
The relationship between The United States of America and Canada has often been summed up as Canada being a little brother; an America Junior with no soul of its own. In many ways, this is not inaccurate. However, those who say this are typically are ignorant of the clusterfuck known as official bilingualism.
Here’s an quick Canadian civics crash course: On the federal level, Canada is officially bilingual. On the provincial level, only New Brunswick is officially bilingual, Quebec has French – or the horrid Quebecois variant of it anyway, where it sounds like simultaneously choking on a bone, vomiting and having a frog attempt to climb out of your throat - as its official monolingual language. However, at the provincial level, there is frequently a requirement in predominantly English-speaking provinces to be able to speak French in government related jobs, and it is virtually mandatory at the federal level to have a fair degree of bilingual fluency in it.
Before I go any further, I will point out that bilingualism is not inherently bad as a concept. Bilingualism and multilingualism are not unique to Canada, although the dynamics are fairly unique to my knowledge. I myself am fluent in two languages, and have studied a several more that I cannot honestly proclaim fluency in.
The difference with Canada is, it is all very shoehorned into what it has imagined as an artificial ideal identity, as opposed to a natural multilingualism emerging in many other countries, where it being codified in law follows from it rather than vice versa. This is also why they have absurd policies like “play X percentage of songs on the radio from Canadian musicians” and various bills to try to make regulate content to be “more Canadian”.
The vast majority of the Francophone population is in Quebec, and outside of Montreal, where I have been to a couple of times, there is much less multilingualism. As of writing this, the percent of people who speak both English and French fluently in Canada is approximately 18% of the population. With this in mind, can you see the issue with having bilingualism in both languages as part of government? There is a “bilingual elite” of sorts, who are implicitly more likely to accept and reject certain ideas about the country (i.e. Quebec and the Prairies remaining in federation with Canada).
Although having mandatory French lessons as part of the curriculum has been something that has changed several times on and off, and only goes to a certain grade level, the fact is in many regions, people hardly use the other languages, which means that there is a vast polarization. What people seldom realize is that knowing multiple languages affects your way of thinking. It affects you psychologically on some understudied level. There was a study I saw some time ago, about Israel-Palestinian relations, where a certain bilingual Israeli category – reporters or journalists perhaps – were most likely to have a more conciliatory attitude between the countries. With bilingualism tightly integrated as a requirement in the Canadian government at all levels, the vast majority of the country who do not speak both English and French fluently are effectively excluded from a plethora of positions.
Canada heavily promotes “multiculturalism” and “diversity” while at the same time having a requirement of two languages to participate in federal government, the languages of two cultures of which are often at odds with each other on a fundamental level. Getting weasels like Justin Trudy who fellate these laughable principles elected repeatedly is no coincidence. Quebec and the rest of the country tend to disagree on a lot of things, and Quebec generally wants to stay as part of the country as long as more money is shoveled at them, while having privileges that exceeded that of any other provinces.
In the US, while there is little dejure that is like this, in some places in the southern US, there are some places where some Hispanics refuse to deal with others in any other language than Spanish. I know because I have encountered this myself. Kind of like Quebec outside of Montreal, except a bit more baffling due to differing circumstances.
What should one take away from this? Canada deserves to fragment into a dozen pieces. Absorb most of into the US. Hell, let it return to wilderness if there is nothing that can be saved. This is just one of many part of the current foundation that is a mess, and it’s not going to get any better with the current direction of things.
The vaccine mandates on government workers on top of this also suggest that they may be more likely to accept certain ideals on top of Anglo-French bilingualism. In doing these things, among others, the government is pruning its own bureaucratic class as something that matches its own particularly ideology.