First, I would suggest that we move from Canada's legal linguistic framework to a language planning policy. Thirty years of bilingualism in Canada have not resulted in any language planning policy on our territory.
I think we have spent too much time attempting to give legal recognition to both languages, to establish their equality, rather than to plan their use. As an example, I would cite the recent Supreme Court decision on bilingual services that must be provided by the RCMP to the entire province of New Brunswick. In my opinion, that does not provide much of an advantage to New Brunswick's francophone community. It seems to me that it would be better to have a policy to provide French-language legal institutions and to allow French to be used at work rather than to simply recognize that a linguistic duality applies throughout the province.
There is no shortage of examples. I am suggesting a very simple outlook: there should be less emphasis on a Canada-wide recognition of bilingualism and more attention paid to promoting French-language spaces and institutions. In other words, we should emphasize planning over legislation.
This leads me to my second and final point, asymmetry. A legal framework is universal. A policy can be targeted. The B & B Commission had called for bilingual districts. I would prefer to say that it was advocating districts in Canada where the French language could be asserted. The choice was made to have national bilingualism, but that did not prevent the decline of the French language outside Quebec.
With asymmetry we could straighten the existing language comfort zones rather than dilute all of the efforts that are made throughout the country. This would, in my opinion, be better suited to the sociological reality of language territorialization. It would allow for the strengthening of regions where, culturally, there is an easier reproduction of the French language even if economically these regions are in a downturn.
For example, one of the best things that we could do to develop the francophonie outside Quebec would be to declare northern and eastern New Brunswick as priority development zones, a type of Marshall plan for the regions where the francophonie has its roots, regions that are shrinking, not because of assimilation but because of economic underdevelopment.
I will end by saying that we need more language development policies and more asymmetry in the way in which these policies are devised. I am not saying that we should give up on Canada-wide bilingualism. That is an essential component of any binational concept. However, a legal framework is not a language policy. In Canada, we thought that the equality of both languages was a language policy, and no thought was given to developing any type of language planning policy.