Air Canada CEO Michael Rousseau gives a speech at the Montreal Chamber of Commerce in November, 2021.Mario Beauregard/The Canadian Press
Prime Minister Mark Carney marked the International Day of La Francophonie on March 20 by reminding the world that the French language “is at the heart of the Canadian identity.”
Canada remains an officially bilingual country that considers its linguistic duality a core strength and cultural marker that distinguishes us from, well, you know who. Accordingly, Mr. Carney noted, French is “essential to Canada’s global leadership.”
Air Canada chief executive officer Michael Rousseau does not appear to have seen that PMO memo.
If he had, he might have thought twice before recording a video – in the wake of Sunday’s tragic crash of an Air Canada plane in New York – that was in English only. While the nearly-four-minute video did have French subtitles, the fact that Mr. Rousseau uttered only two words en français – bonjour at the beginning and merci at the end – spoke volumes about how seriously Canada’s flag carrier takes its Official Languages Act obligations.
Predictably, Mr. Rousseau’s faux pas sparked outrage in Quebec, where keeping track of Air Canada’s serial violations of the law is a provincial pastime and endless source of linguistic grievance. Year after year, Canada’s Official Languages Commissioner gets more complaints about the airline than any other institution. The lack of meaningful improvement tells you a lot about how seriously the carrier really takes official bilingualism.
Mr. Rousseau’s latest linguistic blunder – his inability to speak French has repeatedly landed him in hot water since his appointment as CEO in 2021 – was especially grating because flight AC8646 originated in Montreal. Many of its 72 passengers and four crew members, including one of the two pilots killed in the crash, were francophones.
Carney says he’s disappointed in Air Canada CEO’s English-only condolences
“Air Canada, which has its head office in Montreal, with a flight leaving from Montreal, a Québécois pilot and Québécois crew, and everything is in English?” remarked one complainant in La Presse. “You can’t get more of a caricature than that.”
While Mr. Rousseau’s tone-deaf video was the lead story on Radio-Canada’s flagship news broadcast, Le Téléjournal, on Tuesday night, CBC’s The National made no mention of the incident, despite its extensive coverage of the accident at New York’s LaGuardia Airport. Read what you will into that editorial decision by the public broadcaster’s English network.
Prime Minister Mark Carney says a unilingual video message of condolence from Air Canada CEO Michael Rousseau following the plane crash that killed two of the company's pilots lacks compassion. Rousseau is being summoned to a House of Commons committee to explain the decision.
The Canadian Press
I get it that, in most of Canada, French seems so yesterday. Since the adoption of the Official Languages Act, in 1969, Canada’s population has become more linguistically diverse, and francophones account for a smaller proportion of the total. They made up 27.5 per cent of the country’s residents in 1971; their share fell to 22 per cent in 2021.
Fewer Canadians outside Quebec are bilingual, despite the popularity of French immersion classes in certain elite circles. Most graduates of French immersion programs in the rest of Canada would struggle to function in francophone Quebec and appear to lose what rudimentary French-language abilities they acquire within a few years of leaving school.
Some critics have lambasted Ottawa for prioritizing francophone immigrants over higher-skilled anglophone or allophone applicants for permanent residency under a policy aimed at repopulating French-speaking communities outside Quebec. But if you care about the fate of French in Canada, you should be concerned about the steady disappearance of francophone populations outside Quebec.
They are our linguistic canaris dans la mine de charbon.
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The irony is, the French language is flourishing outside Canada. On International Francophonie Day, the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie, the francophone equivalent to the Commonwealth, released its quadrennial report on the global state of the French language. In 2025, the number of francophones (defined expansively by the OIF to include anyone who can communicate in spoken or written French) approached 400 million, or almost double the 220 million francophones the OIF counted in 2010.
That makes French the world’s fourth most spoken language, after English, Mandarin and Spanish; it is also the second most studied language after English.
The OIF has widened its definition of “francophone” in recent years. But the main reason for the increase since 2010 lies in rapid population growth in Africa, where former French and Belgian colonies have French as an official language or use it as the main language of public administration. The OIF projects that the continent, already home to two-thirds of the world’s francophones, could see its share rise to 90 per cent by 2050. By then, the total number of francophones in the world could near the 600-million mark.
“By 2050,” the OIF report notes, “the future of French will no longer be determined from Paris, but rather conceived in Abidjan, Beirut, Brussels, Dakar, Kinshasa, Montreal, Port-au-Prince, Tunis or Yaoundé.”
With a growing global market of francophones, Air Canada could have made bilingualism its calling card. Too bad Mr. Rousseau has once again manqué le bateau.