Democracy Gone Astray

Democracy, being a human construct, needs to be thought of as directionality rather than an object. As such, to understand it requires not so much a description of existing structures and/or other related phenomena but a declaration of intentionality.
This blog aims at creating labeled lists of published infringements of such intentionality, of points in time where democracy strays from its intended directionality. In addition to outright infringements, this blog also collects important contemporary information and/or discussions that impact our socio-political landscape.

All the posts here were published in the electronic media – main-stream as well as fringe, and maintain links to the original texts.

[NOTE: Due to changes I haven't caught on time in the blogging software, all of the 'Original Article' links were nullified between September 11, 2012 and December 11, 2012. My apologies.]

Wednesday, January 18, 2012

Still unilingual after all these years

Canada's provinces spend almost $1-billion a year offering services and education in both official languages. According to a report issued Monday by Vancouver's Fraser Institute, the more than $900-million spent by the provinces each year, coupled with the $1.5-billion Ottawa spends offering federal services in French and English, means that bilingualism costs Canadian taxpayers $2.4-billion annually.

Is it worth it? In just two provinces - Quebec and New Brunswick - are more than 1% of the population unilingual in a minority language. According to the 2006 Census, 2.4% of Quebec's population (182,000 people) are unilingual anglophones, unable to speak and understand French. Meanwhile, 10.2% of New Brunswickers (about 75,000 people) claim to be unilingual francophones who struggle to comprehend English.

Only in one other province do as many as four-tenths of 1% of the population identify themselves as exclusive speakers of the minority official language. That is in Ontario, where just over 43,000 of the province's more than 13 million residents claim to be unilingual French.

Just 0.05% of Albertans (1,600 residents) claim to speak French only. In Saskatchewan, that number is fewer than 400 people. In B.C., it's about 1,200. In each of P.E.I. and Newfoundland, there are fewer than 100 French-only residents, yet those two provinces spend about $5million and $3.4-million, respectively, offering bilingual services.

Newfoundland and Labrador spends $1,780 per francophone - the most of any province - catering to a minoritylanguage community of about 2,000. But according to Statistics Canada, only about 50 Newfoundlanders claim to speak only French, which means the provincial government is spending about $68,000 a year for every resident who truly needs bilingual services.

Ontario spends the most overall of any province and the second most per capita. Of the $900-million spent by the 10 provinces on official bilingualism, Ontario spends 70% ($623-million). That works out to $1,275 per francophone Ontarian. But only about one in 10 franco-Ontarians is unable to speak English, which means that every year, Ontario's provincial government is spending nearly $13,000 on language services for every unilingual francophone.

In total, across the country, just over 1.5 million Canadians are designated as "official language minority" in their provinces. But just 300,000 people are minority-language speakers who are unable to communicate in the language of the majority that surrounds them. In other words, it could be argued that there are just 300,000 Canadians who need official bilingual services. At a total tab - federal, as well as provincial - of $2.4-billion, that works out to $8,000 per year, per minority-language Canadian who is truly in need of bilingual service.

And that $8,000 is on top of the cost of public services. The Fraser Institute (basically) calculates the cost of bilingualism by looking at the per capita cost of providing public services, such as education, health care and welfare, then determines the cost of providing those services to the minority-language community and attributes the difference to bilingualism. So what I am saying (because this calculation is mine, not Fraser's), is that providing public services to minority-language Canadians costs about $8,000 extra, per person, per year for those 300,000 Canadians who cannot speak the minority language around them.

That's quite a premium to ensure unilingual anglophones in Quebec and unilingual francophones elsewhere are served equally.

The irony is that Quebec is the province that spends far and away the least per capita providing government services to its official-language minority. At just $88 per anglophone, Quebec is tenth in per capita spending by a margin of $269. New Brunswick, in ninth place, spends $357 per minority francophone, according to the Fraser Institute. Still, New Brunswick's tab for official bilingualism amounts to 1.5% of the total provincial budget. Quebec's is just .007%.

Most importantly, what has come of all of this spending? Very little.

The truth is that Canadians remain about as bilingual as they were when the Official Languages Act was passed in 1967. After more than 40 years spent promoting official bilingualism, 97% of Ontarians still work almost entirely in English (down from 98% four decades ago), while 23% of Quebecers work almost daily in English, the same percentage as when this grand experiment began.

Official bilingualism is an expensive, political sop that has made Canadians no more linguistically twin-tongued - nor any more unified.

Original Article
Source: National Post 

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