Education

Opinion: Canada’s Bilingualism Policy Hasn’t Worked

By Mary Ann Zehr — April 21, 2010 1 min read
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Canada as well as the United States have some people who don’t think that a federal government should spend money on making more than one language official, according to a commentary published in the National Post.

In the opinion piece, Lorne Gunter argues that the Canadian government’s language-related spending over four decades, costing several billion dollars, has done very little to turn the lion’s share of Canadians into bilingual speakers of French and English. Gunter lists the support by the Canadian government of language-minority schools as among the failed policies.

I picked this item up on Twitter from Morsmal, a nonprofit organization with official ties to UNESCO that runs a Web portal on multilingual information (@Morsmal).

Readers, if any of you live in Canada or are familiar with language policy there, fill us in on some of the other viewpoints that may exist on this issue.

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A version of this news article first appeared in the Learning the Language blog.