Canada's culture: bilingual by statute, multilingual by census

How English and French became equal in law

The Constitution Act, 1867 gave the two languages limited protection: section 133 guaranteed that either could be used in the Parliament of Canada. Full official status came with the Official Languages Act of 1969, which grew out of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, appointed in 1963 in response to unrest in Quebec during the Quiet Revolution.

The census measures what happened next. Statistics Canada counts each person's first official language spoken, and in 2021 it was English for 75.5% of the population and French for 21.4%. In 1971, the first census to ask, French had stood at 27.2%. The number of French speakers is still rising, to more than 7.8 million in 2021, but more slowly than the population, and most immigrants whose mother tongue is neither official language take up English: 80.6% of them in 2021, against 6.1% who took up French.

Bilingualism has barely moved. In 2021, 18.0% of Canadians could hold a conversation in both English and French. The figure hides two opposite trends: in Quebec the bilingual share rose from 44.5% in 2016 to 46.4% in 2021, while outside Quebec it fell from 9.8% to 9.5%.

Why Quebec legislates for French on its own

Quebec did not accept the federal model. In 1977 the Parti Québécois government passed the Charter of the French Language, known as Bill 101, which made French the official language of the province, required French on commercial signs and sent the children of most immigrants to French-language public schools. The sign rules have been fought in court ever since. In 1988 the Supreme Court of Canada struck down the ban on English on outdoor signs, and in 1989 the National Assembly used the notwithstanding clause to keep it for five years; the rules were later loosened to allow other languages as long as French predominates. Bill 96, which amended the Charter of the French Language, passed on 24 May 2022 by 78 votes to 29.

Opposition to federal multiculturalism has always been strongest in Quebec, where critics argued it placed French culture on the same footing as every immigrant culture. The province adopted its own policy of cultural convergence, and the Bouchard-Taylor commission, set up in 2007, recommended interculturalism: French as the common public language, with cultural communities integrating around it.

The numbers in Quebec cut both ways. In 2021, 85.5% of Quebecers spoke French at home at least regularly, but the share who spoke it predominantly fell from 79.0% to 77.5% between 2016 and 2021. The number whose first official language is English passed one million for the first time, 13.0% of the province, seven in ten of them on the Island of Montreal or in Montérégie.

What languages Canadians speak at home

In 2021, 4.6 million Canadians spoke a language other than English or French predominantly at home, 12.7% of the population against 7.7% in 1991. Nine million, one in four, had such a mother tongue, the highest share since the census first asked the question in 1901. Mandarin and Punjabi each had more than half a million speakers who used them most often at home, and between 2016 and 2021 the number speaking a South Asian language such as Gujarati, Punjabi, Hindi or Malayalam grew at least eight times as fast as the population.

Canada is also a place where people switch. In 2021, 41.2% of Canadians could hold a conversation in more than one language, up from 39.0% in 2016, and one in eleven could manage three or more. Among those whose mother tongue is neither English nor French, seven in ten spoke an official language at home at least regularly.

How immigration built a country of many origins

In 2021 more than 8.3 million people, 23.0% of the population, were or had been landed immigrants or permanent residents, above the previous peak of 22.3% recorded in 1921. Just over 1.3 million arrived between 2016 and 2021. Asia, including the Middle East, is now the main source region. Statistics Canada projects that immigrants could make up 29.1 to 34.0% of the population by 2041, because the population is ageing and fertility is below replacement.

The census recorded more than 450 ethnic or cultural origins in 2021. The origins reported most often, alone or with others, were Canadian by 5.7 million people, English by 5.3 million, Irish and Scottish by 4.4 million each, and French by 4.0 million. South Asian, Chinese and Black Canadians together made up 16.1% of the population.

The federal policy that goes with this dates from 1971. Pierre Trudeau introduced it in the House of Commons as multiculturalism within a bilingual framework, and said that although there were two official languages there was no official culture. Section 27 of the Charter of Rights requires the Charter to be read consistently with the multicultural heritage of Canadians, and the Canadian Multiculturalism Act followed in 1988. Critics have argued since the 1970s that the policy discourages integration; the writer Neil Bissoondath made the case in 1994. The philosopher Will Kymlicka answered in 1998 with evidence from naturalisation, political participation, language learning and intermarriage that immigrants integrate no more slowly under it.

What Canadians believe now

The religious census moved a long way in twenty years. Just over half the population reported a Christian religion in 2021, and more than a third reported none.

In Quebec the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s overturned an establishment centred on the Catholic Church. Quebec's secularism law of 2019, which bars public employees in positions of authority from wearing religious symbols at work, grew out of the same province's argument over how far public institutions should accommodate religion.

How Indigenous cultures outlasted the bans

The 2021 census counted 1.8 million Indigenous people, 5.0% of the population: 58.0% First Nations, 34.5% Métis and 3.9% Inuit. There are more than 600 First Nations, and Inuit Nunangat, the Inuit homeland, spans four regions and 50 communities. The Indigenous population was on average 8.2 years younger than the rest of the country and grew by 9.4% between 2016 and 2021.

The Indian Act banned the potlatch in 1884 and widened the ban in 1895 to festivals, dances and ceremonies; the bans were lifted in the revised Act of 1951. Many residential schools forbade children to speak their own languages. In 2021, 189,000 people had an Indigenous mother tongue, Cree languages and Inuktitut chief among them, and 237,420 Indigenous people could hold a conversation in an Indigenous language. The number with an Indigenous mother tongue is falling, while the number who learned one as a second language is rising.

The art is older than the country. Coastal nations carved totem poles from western red cedar. Inuit carving in soapstone, walrus ivory, muskox horn and caribou antler shows daily life, myth and legend, and has been prominent since the 1950s. The painter Emily Carr made her name with pictures of totem poles in British Columbia, and the name Canada itself comes from kanata, the St. Lawrence Iroquoian word for a village or settlement. National Indigenous Peoples Day falls on 21 June.

What Canadians eat and where it comes from

Wikipedia's survey of Canadian cuisine quotes Joe Clark's description of it as a cuisine of cuisines, and the dishes bear it out. The three oldest roots are Indigenous, English and French. The plains peoples made pemmican and dried meat; bannock, a fried bread, came out of the exchange between Indigenous cooks and fur traders; moose, bison and wild berries, Saskatoon berries and cloudberries among them, are still gathered and hunted. French Canada kept the tourtière and built its winter food on colonial provisions.

Quebec is the birthplace of maple syrup production. The earliest syrups were made by freezing the sap again and again and throwing away the ice to concentrate the sugar. Poutine, fries and fresh cheese curds under gravy, first appeared in snack bars in rural Quebec in the late 1950s, close to the cheese dairies of Centre-du-Québec. Its origin is argued over town by town: Fernand Lachance of Warwick said he first put curds on fries for a regular customer in 1957.

The regions eat differently. The Maritimes eat lobster and dulse, the north eats game, British Columbia eats salmon and crab, and Montreal has its own bagels and smoked meat, both first made by its Jewish community. Butter tarts and Nanaimo bars are counted among the national foods.

How hockey and lacrosse became national sports

Ice hockey is Canada's official national winter sport, and lacrosse, a game of Indigenous origin, is its official summer sport. Canadian football has its own rules and its own championship, the Grey Cup. Soccer is played across every age group and background, and the country has three clubs in Major League Soccer. Curling and ringette are also among the common sports, and the long winters gave Canada its own tradition of snowshoeing and cross-country skiing, which nineteenth-century writers held up as proof of a northern character.

Where Canadian arts meet American media

The arts have been shaped by the neighbour next door. A long shared border, a common language for most people and a heavy flow of American media make it hard for English Canada to keep its own, so Ottawa set up the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and the National Film Board, and the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission requires broadcasters to carry a minimum share of Canadian content. French-language television, protected by language, often draws larger domestic audiences than its English counterpart.

The Group of Seven developed the first distinctly Canadian style of painting, in large, brightly coloured scenes of the wilderness. Canadian literature runs in two streams, French and English, and national identity is one of its recurring subjects, from Hugh MacLennan's Two Solitudes of 1945 to Alistair MacLeod's No Great Mischief of 1999. Michael Ondaatje won the Booker Prize in 1992, Margaret Atwood in 2000 and Yann Martel in 2002, and Alice Munro received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013.

Film has the same split. The National Film Board produces and distributes films that reflect Canada to Canadians, and the country's documentaries run from Nanook of the North to Canada: A People's History; French-Canadian directors such as Denys Arcand, whose The Barbarian Invasions won the Academy Award for best foreign-language film, work in a market sheltered by language; and Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner came out of Inuit cinema. Since the 1980s Vancouver in particular has been known as Hollywood North, where American series are filmed. Montreal hosts the bilingual Just for Laughs comedy festival. The anthem, O Canada, was written in French for the Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day of 1880, with music by Calixa Lavallée; English lyrics followed in 1906, and it became the national anthem in 1980.