The law's stated goals include ensuring "respect for English and French as the official languages of Canada" and their equality of status "as to their use in all federal institutions ..." and supporting "the development of English and French linguistic minority communities and generally advanc(ing) the equality of status and use of the English and French languages within Canadian society ..."
Under that law, successive federal governments have for decades funded a range of services to francophone communities outside Quebec, and to anglophone communities in Quebec. The unstated ultimate purpose of it all is to help official-language-minority communities survive, in some cases against considerable odds.
But the reality seems to be that spending millions of dollars providing bilingual government services widely ("where numbers warrant") and supporting minority communities is not enough to keep those groups strong.
Figures made public last week confirm a persistent trend: Francophones from across the country are gravitating to Quebec and anglophones are leaving Quebec.
The numbers involved vary from year to year, sometimes even reversing slightly, but the overall trend remains: Quebec is becoming more French; New Brunswick is bilingual; the rest of the country is English. Prime ministers from Trudeau to today have had little success in helping the minority communities grow.
Part of the process of linguistic consolidation is the result of the emptying-out of rural areas. Family farms, isolated village,s and one-industry towns are no longer the mainstays of Canadian rural life that they once were.
But at the same time that people are leaving rural areas, they are also choosing their destinations, it appears, with an eye to linguistic demographics. This is true within provinces, as well as between them: English-speakers leaving the Saguenay are being absorbed by the anglophone community in Montreal.
The figures are not utterly bleak, and the process need not be irreversible. Within Quebec, for example, there are hopeful signs that the trend could be reversed. For the first time in decades, there has been a slight increase in the all-important anglophone 20- to 29-year-old demographic. And Quebec's economy, which when it lagged significantly behind the rest of the country gave anglophones a motive to leave, has now pretty well caught up.
Francophone communities elsewhere, is should be acknowledged, are having a harder time than anglophones in Quebec. But they should be encouraged and helped where effective help is possible, because minority French and English communities help to bind our linguistic dualities together. The end of the process of consolidation is Belgium, where the two communities have little in common. Nobody in Canada, except hard-line sovereignists, really wants that.
It is not, on the other hand, clear what more steps can be taken to encourage official-language minorities. This is a challenge which the three federalist parties in Parliament need to take up.