Talk:Language policies of Canada's provinces and territories

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The information in this article

I am concerned that the current version of this article presents several statements as fact, when the statements are either debatable or clearly wrong. For example, Ontario is listed under the heading "officially bilingual or multilingual". But there is no specific law describing Ontario as "officially bilingual", is there? Indeed if you go to the "About Ontario" section of the Ontario Government web site, it says the following:

English is Ontario's official language; however there are entire communities where French is as easily spoken as English, thanks to their French-Canadian history. [1]

Perhaps you can argue that certain other facts lead to the conclusion that Ontario is, in fact, "officially bilingual", but that depends on your definition of "official language" and similar terms.

Another example is the four provinces listed under the heading "officially English". For each of them you can debate the correctness of saying that English is the only official language. In the case of Alberta, the article states:

Under the Language Act 1988, Alberta was declared a unilingual English province ...

But that is plainly wrong as far as I can see, examining the text of the Act.

Then we have Manitoba listed as bilingual while Quebec is listed as unilingual. That too is debateable, insofar as the constitutional requirements for Manitoba to be bilingual are the same requirements that Quebec has. It's true that Quebec has a law declaring French to be its official language, but you can argue that despite the law, Quebec is officially bilingual by reason of the Constitution. (Or conversely, someone can reasonably argue that Manitoba is not officially bilingual, but rather just has certain constitutional obligations in respect of the French language).

Those are the basic reasons that I find the article quite problematic in terms of Wikipedia's core content policies. —Mathew5000 (talk) 01:11, 12 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The interpretation of Alberta as officially English came from the Municipal Affairs dept of the Alberta government. If that link still worked, I would quote it. The placement of Ontario one was not based on any specific information, and I struggled with where to place Ontario because of its unique regionalized scheme. The quote you provided will now go in the article. The point about Manitoba is Quebec is well taken, and this needs to be better explained in the article. Please feel free to help out. --Kevlar (talk • contribs) 03:05, 21 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

In my defence, (one of) the most important aspect of language policy that people care about is the government's insistence that business be conducted in a certain language, since this effects people even if they rarely interact with the civil service. Quebec is unique is requiring that private businesses use French. The article is weak on this point, I'll admit. Quebec also requires immigrants to educate their children in French, which is also unique, so this is quite different from Manitoba. --Kevlar (talk • contribs) 03:35, 21 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

About Alberta, you may be interested in this Library of Parliament publication whose appendix describes English as the official language of Alberta, citing the Languages Act. But I half-wonder if the author of that publication was primarily relying on this Wikipedia article! Because as I said before, the Language Act does not expressly declare English the "official language". As for the document formerly on the Municipal Affairs department web site, maybe it was taken down because they decided it was not accurate. Still, it's just my opinion that Alberta should not be described as "officially monolingual", and of course on Wikipedia my opinion is not a reliable source, while the Library of Parliament is.

On your second point, I agree with you that "language policies" is much broader than "official languages", and in particular the issues (in Quebec) about commercial signs, workplace language, and communication between private businesses, clearly fall under "language policies of Canada's provinces" although they do not relate to the issue of "official language". (There already exists the article Legal dispute over Quebec's language policy, which takes a historical view; I would say that the present article should describe the current situation.) About the language of education, that too clearly falls under the scope of "Language policies of Canada's provinces and territories". At present it is covered in Section Twenty-three of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Mathew5000 (talk) 19:31, 21 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]