The province of Quebec is unique in North America, a vibrant community made up of almost six million people whose mother tongue is French, 700,000 whose mother tongue is English and another half million whose first language is neither French nor English. French-speaking Canadians account for almost a quarter of Canada's total population, with a million residing in provinces other than Quebec.

Quebec's French culture and language have flourished in Canada, in large part because of the determination of its people to resist assimilation into the English-speaking majority, but also because the Canadian federation has provided guarantees, from its beginnings, for their language and culture.

Canada was discovered by French explorer Jacques Cartier in 1534 and first settled by French colonists in the early 17th century. When Britain acquired the territory of Canada under the Treaty of Paris ending the Seven Years' War in 1763, it chose not to force the colony's 60,000 French-speaking Catholic inhabitants to assimilate with the rest of British North America. The Quebec Act of 1774 authorized the use of French civil law (distinct from British common law) in the colony, allowed Roman Catholics to hold office, guaranteed the French seigneurial system of land ownership, and affirmed religious freedom for Quebec's Catholic majority. The Quebec Act has been cited as the precedent for recognition of Quebec as a distinct society within Canada.

At the time of Confederation in 1867, the French-speaking population of the new Dominion of Canada was about one million, out of a total of 3.5 million. The Constitution Act, 1867 (then known as the British North America Act) contained specific provisions designed to protect Quebec's distinct culture and the use of French in areas where it had been established. It guaranteed the use of English and French in Parliament and the Quebec legislature and courts, recognized Quebec's civil law code and provided for publicly- financed separate schools for Protestant and Catholic minorities in Quebec and Ontario (and later in Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta).

By the middle of the next century the use of French had declined significantly outside Quebec, while within the province the English-speaking minority dominated the economy. The situation began to change in the 1960s, when the provincial Liberals led by Jean Lesage took power from the traditionalist Union Nationale party. Between 1960 and 1966, the Liberals undertook to modernize the social, political and educational systems of the province, effecting a remarkable transformation known as "the Quiet Revolution." The Lesage government, whose re-election slogan in 1962 was "maîtres chez nous," masters in our own house, sought and won additional taxing powers from the federal government and the right to withdraw from certain federal-provincial cost-sharing programs, with compensation.

The Sovereigntist Movement in Quebec

During the 1960s, sentiment grew in Quebec for the province's independence from Canada. In 1967, René Lévesque, a former energy minister in the Lesage government, left the Liberal Party and founded a party advocating Quebec sovereignty in an association with Canada, which merged with a separatist party to become the Parti Québécois the next year. In 1976 the Parti Québécois defeated the governing Liberals and took power in Quebec. Four years later the party suffered a defeat in a referendum in Quebec in which it was denied a mandate to negotiate "sovereignty-association" with Canada. The "No" forces prevailed by a margin of 60 to 40 per cent.

That year, fulfilling a promise made by Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau for "renewed federalism," the federal government launched a series of constitutional negotiations with the provinces. An agreement for constitutional change with patriation of the Constitution from Great Britain was reached with nine provinces, but the National Assembly of Quebec rejected it. The Constitution was patriated in 1982 without the consent of the Quebec legislature.

Two subsequent attempts to resolve the constitutional concerns of Quebec and others were unsuccessful. The "Meech Lake Accord," signed by Conservative Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and all 10 provincial premiers in 1987, included recognition of Quebec as a distinct society within the Constitution and a requirement for unanimous provincial consent for certain constitutional amendments, as well as other provisions of interest to Quebec. It lapsed when two provinces failed to ratify it within the three-year deadline. A broader agreement, the "Charlottetown Accord," which dealt with Aboriginal self-government and reform of the Senate as well as Quebec's concerns, was defeated in a national referendum in 1992.

The Parti Québécois took power again in Quebec in 1994 and held another referendum in October 1995 on sovereignty combined with an offer to Canada of a "new economic and political partnership." This option was narrowly defeated.

Later that year, to fulfill promises made by Prime Minister Jean Chrétien during the referendum campaign, the federal government introduced a resolution in Parliament recognizing Quebec as a distinct society based on its French-speaking majority, unique culture and civil law tradition, as well as legislation effectively giving Quebec and the other four regions of Canada a veto over constitutional change. The measures, which were passed by Parliament in late 1995 and early 1996, do not involve constitutional change.

Language Policy

In 1963, in the midst of increasing demands from Quebec for recognition of its unique culture and language, the federal government under Prime Minister Lester Pearson created a "Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism." The commission found evidence of a "crisis" in English-French relations and made sweeping recommendations based on the concept of an equal partnership of French- and English-speakers. The recommendations resulted in 1969 in passage by Parliament, with support from all political parties, of the Official Languages Act. The Act, which was strengthened in 1988 to include a more precise recognition of Canada's two-language character, gives French "equality of status" with English throughout the Parliament and federal institutions and courts of the country. It guarantees that, where numbers warrant, Canadians can receive federal government services in their choice of either official language and commits federal institutions to hiring, under the principle of merit, English- and French-speaking Canadians in numbers reflecting their proportion in the overall population. It gives federal employees the right to work in the official language of their choice in the National Capital Region and certain other areas including New Brunswick and parts of Ontario and Quebec.

Although the Act applied directly only to the federal government and certain federally regulated areas, it led to an expansion of services in French in the provinces and the private sector, including a growth of French immersion programs in schools throughout the country. By the time of the 1991 Census, bilingual Canadians numbered 4.4 million or 16 per cent of the population. While French-speaking Canadians (commonly referred to as francophones) were seriously underrepresented in the federal civil service before enactment of the Official Languages Act, they now make up 28 per cent of the total. New Brunswick, home to about 243,000 French-speakers, became the only officially bilingual province in 1969. Ontario, which has half a million francophones, the largest number outside Quebec, is not officially bilingual, but it has made French a language of the courts and has established parallel English and French school systems and government services.

The principles of the Official Languages Act, as well as certain education rights for linguistic minorities based on the language in which parents had been educated in Canada, were entrenched in the Constitution with the adoption of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982. A 1993 amendment to the Constitution recognizes the equal status of English and French linguistic communities in New Brunswick.

To accommodate the growing number of Canadians for whom neither English nor French is their mother tongue, the federal government in 1972 appointed the first minister responsible for multiculturalism, and it has since provided funding for multicultural activities. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms contains a clause stipulating that it is to be interpreted "in a manner consistent with the preservation and enhancement of the multicultural heritage of Canadians."

In the 1970s and '80s a series of language laws in Quebec sought to establish French as the primary language of work and education. In 1974, the National Assembly under the Liberal government of Robert Bourassa established French as the official language. Three years later the Parti Québécois government introduced the Charter of the French Language, Bill 101, which prohibited languages other than French on public and commercial signs, restricted access to English-language schools and required that employers with more than 50 employees communicate with them in French. The Supreme Court of Canada ruled in 1988 that some provisions of Bill 101 violated freedom of expression guarantees in both the federal and Quebec charters of rights. The Quebec government, again led by Bourassa, subsequently relaxed some of the provisions of the law, allowing languages other than French on interior signs, providing French was predominant. To prevent other court challenges, the Bourassa government invoked the notwithstanding clause of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which allows certain protected rights to be overridden. In 1993, when the notwithstanding clause was due to lapse, the Bourassa government chose not to renew it, instead amending the law to permit other languages on exterior signs as long as French was predominant.

Quebec's language laws do not prevent government services from being offered in English. Under the Constitution Act, 1867, English may be used in the Quebec National Assembly and in court cases, and all provincial acts and regulations are published in both English and French. The Official Languages Act applies to all federal institutions in Quebec, and the provincial government also provides a variety of health and social services to Quebec's English-speaking community.

Canada's Accommodation of Quebec's Distinctiveness

In addition to explicit constitutional guarantees for Quebec's language and civil legal code, Canada's federal system has allowed the province considerable flexibility in adopting policies to protect its distinctiveness.

Through federal-provincial administrative agreements, Quebec governments have sought and won more autonomy for the province, enabling it to adopt a separate Quebec pension plan, collect its own individual and corporate income tax (the federal government collects personal income tax on behalf of all the other provinces), select its own immigrants and integration policies, establish trade and cultural offices abroad, create a Quebec family allowance plan, and establish an investment fund, the Caisse de Dépôt, to promote economic growth in Quebec.

Federal government institutions also help maintain Quebec's culture, and, in fact, Quebec artists receive a percentage of federal cultural funding much larger than the province's percentage of the population.

With the cooperation of the federal government, Quebec has also established a significant presence internationally. Both Quebec and New Brunswick as well as Canada are members of la Francophonie, the association of French-speaking nations. Under agreements Canada has made with France and Belgium, Quebec may conclude agreements directly with those countries in cultural and scientific areas.