MONTREAL — With the virus still running wild, a country divided over vaccine mandates and masks, a Democratic Party riven by internal disputes and inflation fears growing by the month, Americans can be forgiven if they have paid no attention to a speech the president of Air Canada made this month to the Board of Trade of Metropolitan Montreal.
But the uproar that Michael Rousseau prompted with his remarks to a reporter after an English-language address — “I’ve been able to live in Montreal without speaking French, and I think that’s a testament to the city of Montreal” — offers hints about the future of politics in the United States and promises a new area of disputation in what already is poisonous contention in civic life below the Canadian border.
Air Canada is based in the province of Quebec, where the official language is French, and the uproar has not receded. Indeed, the vow of Rousseau, who has lived in Montreal for 14 years, finally to learn French only fanned the flames as being trop peu, trop tard, or too little, too late. The week before last, about 100 demonstrators gathered in front of Air Canada’s headquarters demanding Rousseau’s resignation.
French and English are the twin official languages of Canada, with about 22 percent of the population (about 7.7 million people) declaring French as their first language. In the United States, where there is no official language, nearly 1 in 8 speak Spanish at home. That number is certain to rise, as the Census Bureau predicts that by 2030 Hispanics will account for more than 72 million Americans.
Will competence, if not fluency, in Spanish be a political requirement for future American presidential candidates? We think it will, and sooner than many voters suspect.
America is fast becoming a place where a large minority speaks a language other than English at home. In Canada, the enduring importance of French, a language central to national life since the creation of the country in 1867, led to the formal recognition of two official languages and an increasing expectation that national leaders be bilingual. Though the spurt in Spanish-speaking Americans is more recent and though English is likely to remain the common language of American government and commerce for the immediate future, it already is not the sole language of arts and culture and, for political reasons, American leaders increasingly will find it advantageous to speak both Spanish and English.
With only a handful of exceptions — Michael Dukakis, the Democrats’ 1988 presidential nominee; Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, who was born to Cuban immigrant parents and grew up in a Spanish-speaking home; and former Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida, who married a woman from Mexico — few American national political figures are fluent in Spanish. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont dropped a sentence fragment in Spanish while campaigning in Puerto Rico four years ago, mostly to assert what his audience swiftly ascertained, which was that his Spanish no es muy bueno, which is to say that it wasn’t very good. That same year, Rubio outshined Sen. Ted Cruz in speaking the language, asserting to his GOP rival, “I don’t know how he knows what I said on Univision because he doesn’t speak Spanish.”
Several 2020 presidential candidates, including former Rep. Beto O’Rourke, Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey and former Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Ind., employed at least bits of Spanish in their campaigns. Sanders and billionaire Tom Steyer distributed Spanish-language campaign advertisements in Nevada.
But increasingly that may not be enough, and soon enough American politicians will be asked — will be required — to do more than sprinkle their addresses with Spanish. That will be no challenge for figures such as former San Antonio Mayor Julián Castro, Land Commissioner George P. Bush, Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo and Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, all of whom grew up in Spanish-speaking homes.
ein Berliner in a 1963 speech in Berlin. Such tactics earned Hillary Rodham Clinton criticism for “Hispandering.”
Although several public figures have criticized the notion that Canadian future prime ministers should be bilingual, many voices have reasserted bilingualism as a political imperative for party leaders who are serious about national leadership. As former journalist and federal language commissioner Graham Fraser put it in a widely debated op-ed published in The Globe and Mail newspaper in 2019: “In Canadian politics, there is a word for political leadership candidates and political leaders who are not bilingual: loser.”
A Léger-Journal de Montréal poll at the time suggested that not having a bilingual leader would make it much harder for the Conservatives to beat a Liberal Party headed by the bilingual Justin Trudeau, the son of the man behind the Official Languages Act. Trudeau’s Liberals retained power in this autumn’s national election, which should allow them to move forward with their planned modernization of the Official Languages Act aiming partly at increasing protection for French.
The Canadian debate suggests that, under some conditions, bilingualism can become a genuine political advantage, even a necessity. However, speaking in more than one language offers advantages beyond the political. It enhances a politician’s culture, broadens a leader’s horizons and illustrates a commitment to inclusiveness that is too often missing in our public life. This debate is coming to the United States, as sure as the Census Bureau statistics.
Beland is director of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada. Shribman, executive editor emeritus of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, teaches American politics at McGill ’ s Max Bell School of Public Policy.
