If you follow Canadian news recently, you may have heard some kerfuffle about the CEO of airline Air Canada (headquartered in Montreal, Quebec) not being able to speak French, despite the fact that Air Canada is a company that has to abide by the Official Languages Act (i.e. they must provide service in both English and French). There’s a looooooong history of disputes along linguistic lines in Canada (the history of linguistic disputes here is literally longer than the history of the actual modern country). In the ever enlightening comment section on one news article, I found this gem. This particular comment managed to have a different piece of bad Canadian (and world) history in almost every sentence. Let’s break it down.

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Most of the French people can speak English and many watch Hollywood movies with no problem.

The estimated number of global daily French speakers is more than 275 million, and almost half a billion people are from countries where French is an official language. I will generously assume that our commenter is speaking only about Canada, though I suspect they really aren’t. According to the 2016 official census, 22.4% of the population speaks primarily or only French. Only about 17.9% of the population is bilingual, and it’s safe to say that even if only people whose first language is French are bilingual (which isn’t the case), that still leaves well over 1.5 million French-only speakers in the country. Doing the actual bilingual math puts us at just over 5 million French-only speakers in the country--clearly, our commenter is a bit over-confident about the number of completely bilingual francophones.

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The US saved France in WW2, and the French did not complain that they were saved by English speakers.

Ah yes, the Second World War, famously fought only by the United States. American troops didn’t make up the majority of troops in France (even on D-Day, American forces didn’t take the majority of the beaches). Further to that, France wasn’t liberated only by English speakers. First off, the French Resistance anyone? Information provided by the resistance was critical to military success in France, to say nothing of the countless acts of sabotage on communications and transport networks, power supply stations, and logistical infrastructure. Up to 400,000 resistance members participated in the liberation of France, and that’s not counting the many personal resistance acts by non-Resistance members. Additionally, there were foreign non-English soldiers who actively contributed to the liberation of France, such as the Polish 1st Armoured Division, which was part of First Canadian Army but made up almost entirely of Polish troops who had escaped Hitler’s blitzkrieg. But all this aside, it’s not really clear what the liberation of France in 1944 has to do with centuries-long language disputes in Canada.

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If you immigrate to a new country, you should assimilate.

Beyond any of the potentially racist implications here, I have bad news: French colonization and settlement in Canada predates* English colonization by more than a century. Newfoundland aside (which I don’t mind doing here, both because Newfoundland didn’t join Confederation until 1949 and because it was never really involved in the power struggles or politics happening on the continent), the first permanent European settlement in what is now Canada was founded in 1604 by Samuel de Champlain, who was French. In 1608, Quebec City was founded, by far the oldest and French-est city in Canada. Montreal, Canada’s second-largest city (and largest until the 1970s), was founded in 1642, also by the French. The oldest English city that actually started as an English city and not a French one--again, aside from St. John’s in Newfoundland--was Halifax, founded in 1749. In fact, this earliest European settler-colony wasn’t called Canada; it was called New France, because it was, y’know, exclusively a French colony owned and operated by the French Crown. It wasn’t officially under English-speaking control until the Treaty of Paris in 1763. Francophones, most of which were direct descendants of New France settlers, made up the majority of the Canadian population until just before Confederation in 1867. So, according to the commenter’s logic, we should all be speaking French. Actually, according to their logic, we should all be speaking one of the numerous Indigenous languages, but I digress.

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Additionally, French is a deliberately confusing language. Most of the words are not pronounced the way they are spelled. And each noun has a gender.

Ah, yes. French, the magic language that’s sentient and capable of acting deliberately, is choosing to be malicious and confuse us all! I suspect it’s confusing to the commenter largely because they have never taken the trouble to learn it (or, I suspect, any language other than English). I bet if they tried pronouncing the words according to French letter-groupings instead of English ones, they might find it a little easier. And of course, English is never confusing with its spelling, which can all be understood through thorough thought (sorry). English is a non-phonetic language, meaning our spelling has only some bearing on the pronunciation of the word, to say nothing of cultural spelling, grammar, and accent differences. Also, somewhere between 30%-40% of English is derived from French (thanks Conquest of 1066!), so the point isn’t nearly as good as they think it is.

So there you have it. Canada is a bilingual country for very good, very historical reasons, none of which our dear commenter appears to be aware of. They might want to read a Wikipedia article or two before they try again. More likely they won’t because, let’s be real, it’s someone arguing about what’s a better language in the comments section of a newspaper, but at least I can offer a counter-narrative to some of their misconceptions.

Bibliography

2016 Canadian Census Data, compiled here.

W.G. Hardy, From Sea to Sea: Canada 1850-1910, the Road to Nationhood, 1960.

Ramsey Cook, Canada, Quebec, and the Uses of Nationalism, 1986.

Susan Mann, The Dream of Nation: A Social and Intellectual History of Quebec, 1982.

Peter Price, Questions of Order: Confederation and the Making of Modern Canada, 2020.