Public Attitudes toward Official Bilingualism in Canada: Making Sense of Regional and Subregional Variation

ABSTRACT

Pierre Trudeau’s vision of Canada’s cultural policy was situated within a bilingual framework. Canada, so conceived, has “no official culture” and two official languages. Nearly 50 years later, debates regarding the effects and broader significance of this policy combination persist as illustrated by the recent debate about Supreme Court judges. Yet, Canadians’ attitudes about bilingualism have received relatively little scholarly attention. This paper probes the structure and recent evolution of public attitudes toward the general idea of official bilingualism using the Survey on Official Languages (2003) and the Canadian Election Studies (1997–2011). It goes on to investigate regional differences in public support for bilingual Supreme Court judges using a large-scale survey conducted by Vox Pop Labs in 2015 (n = 291, 577). The combination of these data sources offers new insights into the contextual and individual-level determinants of regional differences in public attitudes toward bilingualism policy in Canada.     

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Is it time to start worrying more about growing regional inequalities in Canada?

Much has been written recently about the rise of within-country inequality and growing imbalances of regional fortunes in the United States and the European Union. In this paper, we apply a novel geo-visualization technique that combines local indicators of spatial association with directional statistics to a unique dataset in order to explore the spatial dimensions of regional income inequalities in Canada from 1981 to 2016. After describing a pattern of growing spatial divergence among regions, we briefly discuss the need for the federal government to explore new types of place-sensitive development policies.     

The language of Australian citizenship

The study of Australian citizenship could no longer be referred to as neglected. Empirical and theoretical studies have shown the development of both the idea and practice to be incremental and ad hoc: a source of inclusion and exclusion. Historians and political scientists have shown how citizenship was developed through studying legislative documents, constitutional devices, common law interpretation, and administrative practice. Whilst many have alluded to the speeches and texts of leaders, in my mind insufficient attention has been placed on the role of political language. My argument aims not only to show how Australian citizenship has been developed but also argues that public political language (with a firm connection to social reality) has, in the absence of legal and official definition and explication, vastly shaped our past and present imaginings of the citizen.