MONTREAL, Nov. 23 (UPI) -- Despite 42-year-old legislation declaring Canada a bilingual country, only 17 percent of Canadians speak both English and French, a forthcoming book says.
Due to be published next month as part of the Queen's University Policy Studies Series, "Life After 40: Official Languages Policy in Canada" says while 41 percent people in Quebec can speak both languages, the majority of people in other provinces can't speak French.
The Liberal government of former Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau passed the Official Languages Act in 1969 which ushered in an era where most senior politicians and bureaucrats had to be fluent in both languages.
Recently though, Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper angered Francophones by nominating Michael Ferguson as the next federal auditor general. Ferguson can't speak French, but told Parliament Monday he was taking intensive lessons and hoped to be fluent within a year.
Meanwhile, Jack Jedwab, one of the book's editors and executive director of the Association for Canadian Studies, told The (Montreal) Gazette Canada's bilingualism rate is only slightly higher than the unilingual United States.
He said in Europe, 56 percent of the population is fluent in two languages and 28 percent of Europeans can speak three languages.
