Canada’s Conservatives continue the billingualism racket

This is completely insane. The Canadian heritage minister, James Moore, is actually complaining that there was not enough French in the opening ceremonies of the 2010 games. This, despite the fact that:

• the games were opened in French by the Governor General
• half of the national anthem was sung in French
• the Vancouver Olympic CEO spoke bits of French despite his obvious hardship in doing so
• Jacques Rogge, the IOC president, gave a lengthy French speech
• all substantial portions of the ceremony were announced in French by the IOC narrators

The only elements of the ceremony that weren’t heavily Frenchified in some manner were the music and poetry performances. But guess what! Those are cultural artifacts of Canada, and Canada is an overwhelmingly English culture! Vancouver is likewise Canada’s second-biggest English city, so it’s not unjustified for our cultural choices to reflect that reality. One can imagine the cultural choices that would be made during a Quebec-based Olympics. We don’t need to imagine very hard, in fact, considering we already had one of those.

The problem with Canada, as I mentioned in my earlier post, is that everything produced in this country is expected to reflect an idealized, and heavily politicized, made-in-Ottawa goodthink version of reality. And that version of reality pretends that Canada is seamlessly bilingual and bicultural, with French and English being spoken in perfect ratio to the comprehension of all (except in Quebec, of course, but their unilingualism can be appreciated as a charming virtue of identity and empowerment).

The cult of bilingualism is a very naked exercise of caste power in the modern Canadian political system. Since the country’s functional bilingual community is so small, but bilingualism so prized, that community inevitably comes to exercise grossly disproportionate control over everything. And since power begets more power, the bilingual clique will almost always insist that nothing is ever bilingual enough, and requires ever-greater meddling from their greasy fingers, even things like the Vancouver Olympics, which are at least nominally a provincial event representing a decidedly non-bilingual community.

Minister Moore is a great example of the sort of person who benefits from the bilingualism racket. He’s from British Columbia, and I knew him quite well at one point because his riding includes the suburb where I live. He was a smart guy, intellectual and witty and open-minded, but not a particularly accomplished or distinguished politician by any stretch. But from practically day one, he was always being touted in the press as a guy who was “going places,” almost exclusively on the basis that was bilingual. (Why or how he wound up bilingual is not clear to me. It is exceedingly rare for someone from BC to speak both official languages unless explicitly programmed to do so in early childhood, through enrollment in French immersion schools and the like.)

I remember attending a candidates’ debate with Moore in 2004, where one of his people, during “questions from the audience” time, asked a planted question in French for no other reason than to show off the fact that Moore was the only candidate capable of answering. And that sort of transparent hokiness paid off, because now Moore is the minister of the entire country’s culture, or at least what Ottawa decrees it should be.

It’s the fact that Moore comes from the Conservative Party that makes this a unique tragedy, however. The Conservative partisan tradition in Canada, especially the more anti-establishment vein embodied by the Reform-Alliance movement that first elected Moore to parliament in 2000, historically understood itself as one willing to defend the interests of English Canadians. When Jean Chretien mocked Reform leader Preston Manning for being a “bad Canadian” because he could not speak French, the party was willing to fire back, and say no, the quirky bilingualism practiced by the Ottawa establishment is not the sole distinguisher of national respectability in a country with over 20 million unilingual, English-speaking citizens.

But is any party willing to say that today?

There is at least one senator and more than a handful of representatives in the United States Congress willing to state that capitalism is a bad idea. The British Parliament contains many folks who would like to abolish the monarchy. President Sarkozy is against the 35-hour work week and the Governor of the Bank of China thinks that Keynesianism is bunk. But no one in this country’s political elite is willing to suggest that spending millions of taxpayer dollars ($7.2 million, in the case of the 2010 games) to impose foreign languages on disinterested communities is ever anything but thoroughly justifiable.