Keith Spicer, who as a spirited government official pushed his fellow Canadians to define their national identity and reconcile their bilingual heritage more than two centuries after the British defeated the French to capture Quebec, died on Aug. 24 in Ottawa. He was 89.
His death, in a hospital, was confirmed to The Canadian Press by Nick Spicer, one of his three children.
Raised by Protestant parents who were anti-Catholic and anti-French, Mr. Spicer began his professional career as a political science professor before being drafted by two prime ministers into ombudsman’s jobs that more risk-averse Canadians might have rejected.
One task was to get all Canadians to accept their country as officially bilingual; the other was hear them out if they complained about language mandates and other irritants.
Mr. Spicer was only 35 in 1970 when the Liberal Party prime minister Pierre Trudeau named him Canada’s first commissioner of official languages, charged with enforcing the Official Languages Act, which gave English and French official status in organizations and institutions under federal jurisdiction.
The law was drafted in the 1960s by a government commission set up to respond to demands for equal language status by the one in four Canadians whose first language was French, and to fend off a volatile secessionist movement in Quebec.
Getting all Canadians on board with bilingualism, however, was easier said than done. A mandate that national air traffic be directed in French as well as English provoked, among other protests, a threat by English-speaking Canadian pilots to disrupt the Montreal Olympics in 1976.
Explaining that bilingualism was required of the government, not of individual Canadians, Mr. Spicer said the policy provided that “each citizen is served in the language he’s taxed in.” But he also promoted the teaching of “French immersion” in English-language schools across Canada.
Known as vociferous and irreverent, Mr. Spicer favored safari suits and Panama hats while working as an editor in Ottawa (where the average low temperature ranges from 6 degrees Fahrenheit in January to 60 in July). He preferred to drink beer from a wine glass because, he said, that’s what Parisians did.
He good-humoredly reminded English speakers that his own affection for French had flowered in the 10th grade, when he began corresponding with a French girl as a pen pal. He was so besotted by a photograph she sent him, he said, that he became a confirmed Francophile.
“Bilingualism and biculturalism work best through biology,” he later declared, adding unabashedly, “The best place to learn French is in bed.”
In 1990, after the collapse of a constitutional compromise that would have further empowered Canada’s provinces and declared Quebec a “distinct society,” Prime Minister Brian Mulroney enlisted Mr. Spicer to take on another challenging task: to lead the Citizens Forum on Canada’s Future, in which he would sound out his fellow…
2023-08-31 17:35:43
Source from www.nytimes.com
rnrn