What Price Social Manipulation?

We're informed by adjunct professor Charles Castonguay through his article, "the contribution of immigration to francophone populations outside Quebec", how thoroughly discredited and unworkable the federal government's campaign to shore up the French language in communities outside Quebec with minority French-language populations has proven to be.

The policy of recruiting francophone immigrants to minority French communities in English Canada has been a failure, with a large number of those immigrants embracing English instead. Predictably enough, because it's a practical solution to fitting in to the majority population of English speakers, and one conducive to advancing the futures of their children in a largely English-speaking environment.

Why should immigrants, after all, be sacrificed as fodder to the aspirations of the French minority, intent on securing their language against all practical odds? "It's a stupid program," Mr. Castonguay claimed in an interview. "We're wasting our bloody money here, because we're actually recruiting anglophones."

Indeed, analysis of government figures demonstrates that within roughly twenty years of immigrating to Canada, a large proportion of francophones outside Quebec adopt English as their primary language of choice. Native French-speakers for that matter, migrating outside Quebec to reside elsewhere in Canada, find themselves assimilating in ever larger numbers into the English-speaking community, along with their children.

It quite simply should not be government policy to spend large sums of taxpayer money to try to ensure that minority French-speaking groups in far-flung towns in parts of Canada which are majority English retain their mother tongues. Canada's Official Languages Commissioner, Graham Fraser has revealed that the federal government is incapable of tracking millions of dollars it hands out in support to provinces for the purpose of fostering bilingualism among schoolchildren.

The funds are being distributed, yet bilingualism is on a downward spiral, despite the funding. The aim was to ensure that half of all high school graduates were functionally bilingual by 2013. "Over the years, millions of dollars have gone from Ottawa to provincial capitals, from provincial capitals to school boards, from school boards to schools and there is very little accountability once it leaves Ottawa in terms of that money actually arriving where it's intended to go", according to Mr. Fraser.

A failed policy, and a costly waste. Social manipulation on this scale is a gamble. People don't take readily to being sidelined when it doesn't seem to be in their best interests. As how could it be, to encourage people to learn and practise a language in a minority situation that will avail them nothing to advance their own personal agendas? It's unreasonable and not too bright for the federal government to make the assumption that people will be happily complicit with the bilingual intent.

There's a really positive aspect to teaching schoolchildren a second language. It's a true asset to be able to speak more than one language, and it puts young people at an obvious advantage to be proficient in both official languages. It's been posited that learning more than one language is beneficial to the thinking process, to the capacity to learn overall, expanding cerebral function. Tell that to kids who resent having to learn another language, and who won't lend themselves to the practical advantage of making an effort.

That old adage of leading a horse to water, but being unable to make him drink if he doesn't feel like it is as true here. Ongoing funding of an unworkable and discredited programme, irrespective of its practical utility in theory, is still a waste of money.