Canada WI: No Official Bilingualism

So this what if is about the Official Languages Act failing, or not happening in 1972 and Canada not having official, enforced, Bilingualism.

Would more of Quebec speak English, etc.?
 
I think, at the very least, the federal government would have to provide a modicum of French-language services for French-speakers within the province of Quebec.

I don't know what the policy was prior to the B&B era, but if the government was already doing that(French services in Quebec), that's arguably a form of official bilingualism, even prior to Trudeau making it a national policy.

Now, if you're refering to the Trudeau policy, in practice I think you could easily jettison French-language services in places where there is only slight French population, and/or the French residents can all speak English.

BUT...

That becomes politically and socially problematic if and when the Quebec government decides they wanna rain hellfire down on the rights of the English minority. Because if the feds object, Quebec can always come back with "Well, no one does sweet bugger-all for the French in Kelowna, why the hell should we do anything for the anglos in Trois-Rivere?

Coast-to-coast bilingualism does seem somewhat absurd at times(and I say this as the scion of Franco-Manitobans who definitely benfitted from the policy), but, in terms of national cohesion, there probably weren't many other options, post-Quiet Revolution.
 
So this what if is about the Official Languages Act failing, or not happening in 1972 and Canada not having official, enforced, Bilingualism.

Would more of Quebec speak English, etc.?
I think it is more likely to have an independent, hyperfrancophone Québec than an anglophone Québec.
 
No federal bi-lingualism would mean greater militancy in Quebec.

B&B was used to buy votes in Quebec by hiring thousands of uppity, bi-lingual Quebecois. Once they received a steady, federal pay-check, they calmed down.

B&B provided greater benefits to French-Canadians living outside Quebec. Acadians living in the Maritimes benefitted. Joual-speaking New Brunswickets benefitted. Metis on the prairies benefitted.

As for Anglo-phones living in Quebec .... they always congregated in a few English-speaking enclaves in the Eastern Townships and in big cities. After the separation scares of the 1960s, wealthy anglophones quietly moved their money to Ontario or points farther west.
Half of my high school graduating class (1974) moved out because there were few jobs for anglophone a in Quebec.

The more powerful Franco-Quebecois families started sending their sons and daughters to Ivy League universities like: Harvard, Yale, MIT, Oxford, etc. to learn second or third languages. Now only peasants are still uni-lingual in Quebec.
I doubt if English will ever become the dominant language of Quebec. The only way for the English language to dominate Quebec is if all the immigrants from Africa and Asia insist on educating their children in English.
 
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You really think so? Things just would have gone as they had gone on for decades and decades before hand.

Québec had changed radically from the 1960s on, with language not religion becoming the main marker of identity.

If Canada could be portrayed believably as a country with a government that did not especially care for the cultural heritage of Francophones, particularly by rejecting the theory of cultural and political duality popular in Québec at the time, then separatism would be that much more popular. Creating a situation where the only way you can have a modern Francophone Québec is to separate it from a thorougly Anglo Canada is a bad strategy.
 
Québec had changed radically from the 1960s on, with language not religion becoming the main marker of identity.

If Canada could be portrayed believably as a country with a government that did not especially care for the cultural heritage of Francophones, particularly by rejecting the theory of cultural and political duality popular in Québec at the time, then separatism would be that much more popular. Creating a situation where the only way you can have a modern Francophone Québec is to separate it from a thorougly Anglo Canada is a bad strategy.

Okay, but imagine a geographically-based version of bilingualism, in which any French speaker in Quebec is guaranteed French services from the federal government, with the rest of the country conducting its business largely in English. Basically, the Quebecois are linguistically maitre chez nous in Quebec, with the blessing of the federal government.

And further imagine that Pierre Elliot Trudeau never comes on the scene, and there's no Charter Of Rights, and thus nothing to interfere with things like the sign laws etc. And Canadian Prime Ministers, French, anglo, whatever, have no interest in knocking over the apple cart, especially if they're not constitutionally required to do so.

French minorities outside Quebec enjoy whatever rights had been conferred on them by pre-existing arrangements(eg. schools in some provinces), and whateve the federal government feels like giving them out of the goodness of their heart("Well, we wanna win a few francophone-heavy ridings in northern Alberta, so let's give 'em their own local CBC station"), but are otherwise left to fend for themselves.

I wonder if this set-up would have much appeal to French Quebeckers. Granted, there wouldn't be all those government jobs available to them in other provinces or Ottawa.
 
Then Quebec becomes that much more annoyed with Anglo Canada. I'd think you might get a closer call in the 1980 referendum, assuming it's not butterflied away.

If there's an equivalent to the 1995 referendum, it might go the other way. OTL, "No" won by about a percentage point.
 
If there's an equivalent to the 1995 referendum, it might go the other way. OTL, "No" won by about a percentage point.

I think that depends if they follow a "soft sovereignty" option, or a "hard sovereignty" one. In OTL's 1995 referendum, the Bloc initially had the latter as its plank and this led Jean Chretien to see the referendum as an easy victory, but then the leader got replaced by a supporter of soft sovereignty a little while before the referendum. This threw Chretien off-guard. If they stick to hard sovereignty, even if there is no bilingualism, the Yes side will still win.
 
"Soft soveriegnty" is a concept that the Parti Quebecois tried to sell to Quebec voters. Few people living outside of Quebec took the concept seriously.
Most other Canadians maintained the attitude that if Quebec voted to separate, then Quebec could pay off its share of the (Canadian) national debt, start minting its own currency, re-negotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement, start recruiting for its own army, build some ice-breakers to keep its portion of the Saint Lawrence Seaway open, pay for its own embassies in foreign capitals, etc.
Most Anglo-Canadians expected a soveriegn Quebec to stand completely on its own.
 
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