Canada’s language policy-choices and the modernization of the Official Languages Act
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The article discusses some of the key amendments to Canada’s Official Languages Act, to be adopted in 2023. It argues that they rest on the view that French is vulnerable in the North American context, an understanding which found confirmation in the publication of the 2021 Census results on English and French in Canada. These amendments are also guided by the principle of substantive equality which justifies the adoption of specific measures for the promotion of French in sectors such as immigration, international affairs, postsecondary education, the economy, and research. However, the article shows that these amendments do not depart completely from the more conventional approach to official languages in Canada informed by political compromise and federalism for reasons of national unity. The principle of substantive equality remains subordinated to the view that English and French need to be treated in a symmetrical fashion. In the end, the article shows that the amendments manage to combine both the principles of formal and substantive equality. It also suggests that the recognition of substantive equality will test the limits of Canada’s more conventional approach to official languages. In conclusion, the article calls for more research to monitor the implementation of these amendments.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".