Unless it’s Canada Day, or there’s a throne speech to be read, no one is likely to notice when the Governor General isn’t around. Before last week, Mary Simon’s name hadn’t cropped up in the National Post for more than a month, and I don’t remember hearing a single person ask, “Hey, what the heck is Mary Simon up to?” This is a feature of constitutional monarchy, not a bug. It’s not constantly all up in your face.
So it’s really quite strange that Simon headed to the Quebec City area last week for some public events, despite her French having apparently improved not much at all in three years — or at least, not to an extent she is willing to use it in public. (In December last year, Simon told Radio-Canada she had received 184 hours of French lessons. Over the weekend she told CTV News that she can, in fact, carry on a brief conversation in French.)
It was weirder still that Simon cancelled the remainder of her Quebec City itinerary after journalists noticed she wasn’t speaking French.
Surely this cannot have come as a surprise to Simon or her team, given the exact same linguistic problem dogged her appointment. Literally the only thing the francophone press care about with respect to Simon is whether she can speak French. And Simon is, after all, a Quebecer. She should have seen this coming, and been prepared for it … or just stayed home and watched Netflix, and no one would have noticed or much cared.
But then, Justin Trudeau is a Quebecer too … and sometimes he hardly seems to understand Quebec at all. Such as when he appointed Mary Simon Governor General, for example, and seemed genuinely surprised when it went down badly among language hawks.
That controversy is now back with a vengeance. What’s supposed to be an apolitical appointment, a symbol of the Crown’s constancy and not much more, has yet again become a political hot potato. Last week every party in the National Assembly deplored Simon’s lack of progress on French. “Where there’s a will, there’s a way,” Liberal MNA Marwah Rizqy sniffed.
“Our official representatives should speak both official languages,” Heritage Minister Pascale St-Onge told reporters in Ottawa … which can only mean either Simon shouldn’t have been appointed in the first place, or perhaps she should be fired now. Trudeau reportedly ignored journalists’ questions about the controversy. Simon must be thrilled with the government’s support!
It is simply undeniable that we are leaving talent on the bench when we insist on bilingualism
St-Onge, among others, did offer the same defence of Simon that many did upon her appointment: OK, she doesn’t speak French, but French simply wasn’t available to her to learn in the federally run day schools she attended in Nunavik. Others have argued in the past that Simon’s English-Inuktitut bilingualism should count for at least as much as English-French bilingualism. People were speaking Inuktitut long before Cartier set eyes on the Gulf of St. Lawrence.
It’s a perfectly valid argument in isolation, but to deploy it publicly you have to either not care or not understand how it goes down in Quebec — which is to say extremely badly. To Quebec’s political class, the notion that francophones “are a minority among many others” in Canada, as Journal de Montréal columnist Guillaume St-Pierre recently put it, spells nothing less than the end of the French language in Canada.
It’s the same apparent blind spot that made Amira Elghawaby an entirely untenable appointment as Trudeau’s special representative on combatting Islamophobia: She had in the past called into question the notion of French-Canadian victimhood, and thus nothing she says will ever be taken seriously in the province that by far has the biggest Islamophobia problem. Every party in the National Assembly wants her fired posthaste.
Similarly, Simon has no high-profile defenders in Quebec. The only bright side, really, is that Quebecers have very little use for the monarchy to begin with.
The consensus, stated or unstated, seems to be that Simon must be lazy and unmotivated not to have learned serviceable French in 184 hours of lessons. Never having attempted to learn French, as an adult, in 184 hours, I don’t know how fair that is. But I do know that it completely ignores the question of language aptitude. That some human beings have more of it than others isn’t an anglophone conspiracy; it’s something the federal government tests civil servants for every day, using the Modern Language Aptitude Test (MLAT).
What if Simon just doesn’t have a huge aptitude for learning new languages? In combination with a lack of access to French-as-a-second-language education early in life, should that disqualify her from a position like Governor General? Should a similar background disqualify an otherwise brilliant jurist from the bench? An otherwise brilliant accountant from being auditor general?
Even to ask the question is to violate the Laurentian covenant, which holds that there’s simply no excuse not to be bilingual. There are myriad excuses not to be bilingual. A 2017 Senate report found almost 80 per cent of French teachers in British Columbia aren’t comfortable speaking French. French immersion programs often have huge waiting lists. Bilingualism is heavily correlated with privilege in Canada, especially outside Quebec. Bilingual Canadians are richer and more educated — the sorts of people who put their kids in French immersion, in other words.
So there is no level playing field. And when it comes to hiring the best and brightest to fill the most important public positions, it is simply undeniable that we are leaving talent on the bench when we insist on bilingualism. Either that trade off is justified, or it isn’t, but pretending it doesn’t exist is simply disreputable. Mary Simon might use her public standing to usefully shed some light on all this, in fact — if not while she’s inhabiting Rideau Hall, then afterwards.
National Post
[email protected]
Get more deep-dive National Post political coverage and analysis in your inbox with the Political Hack newsletter, where Ottawa bureau chief Stuart Thomson and political analyst Tasha Kheiriddin get at what’s really going on behind the scenes on Parliament Hill every Wednesday and Friday, exclusively for subscribers. Sign up here.