The Fate of Canada: F. R. Scott's Journal of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, 1963–1971

by Graham Fraser (editor)

From 1963 until 1971, a group of distinguished Canadians wrestled with the language conflict that ran the risk of tearing the country apart. Among their ranks, F.R. Scott – a poet, intellectual, constitutional expert, human rights activist, and law professor – kept diaries that recounted the meetings of one of Canada’s most significant royal commissions.The Fate of Canada introduces readers to Scott’s biography, puts his diary entries into the political context of the time, and identifies the people he met and the places he visited during the hearings of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism. Scott’s journal entries recording the earliest meetings convey optimism for a bilingual Canada. As the years pass, however, he becomes increasingly concerned that bilingualism is in danger, and Quebec’s English community threatened. His remarks convey a sense of humour and mutual respect amongst the commissioners despite the tensions over language within the group – and across the country.Scott was a champion of English-language rights in Quebec. Never before published, these diaries provide remarkable insight into the inner life of one of twentieth-century Canada’s most significant intellectuals, and a royal commission that shaped the nation’s language policy for decades to come.

350 pages, Kindle Edition

Published September 3, 2021

Reviews

[Christopher Neal · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nobody is better qualified than Graham Fraser to retrieve, edit and explain Frank Scott's Journal on Canada's epoch-defining B & B Commission. Journalist and himself a former Commissioner of Official Languages, Fraser has unmatched insight on the issues Scott addressed with his fellow commissioners, but he also knew Scott personally as a family friend. F.R. Scott was a legal scholar at McGill University, a poet and a prominent public intellectual and democratic socialist between the wars and into the 1960s. He was also a fierce critic of Quebec Premier Maurice Duplessis and a mentor to Canadian Prime Minister (1968-84) Pierre Trudeau. Fraser reveals Scott's passionate love of Canada and desire for it to succeed as a united country which, he thought, depended on addressing the aspirations of its French-speaking minority, concentrated in Quebec. He was, however, clear-eyed about the prospects: "Thinking in Quebec," he writes in 1964, citing his fellow commissioner Clément Cormier, "has already gone so far toward the idea of a kind of semi independent state that it is wholly preoccupied with its new role and what transpires in English Canada has little influence."
The journal is especially revealing on the relationship, divergences and consensus that emerged between Scott and the Commission's first co-chair André Laurendeau before the latter's death in 1968. They agreed, for example, that "Quebec is a unilingual, unicultural society, while English Canada is a unilingual multicultural society." There is much prescience in this book, and much evidence that the challenges of mutual incomprehension and indifference between English and French in Canada remain as daunting today, despite the Official Languages Act that followed the B & B Commission reports. Fraser helps us understand this, not only by editing this engaging text, but also through his thorough explanatory notes, giving background on the personalities and events to which Scott refers in his journal. It is a fascinating and illuminating read for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of the language fault lines that still threaten "the fate of Canada."