Bilingualism and Leadership

A week ago Saturday the federal Liberal party elected a new leader, Stéphane Dion. One of the major criticisms of Mr. Dion prior to the party caucus focused on his language ability. Dion's heavily accented English drew comments such as the following, posted on a Globe and Mail discussion page prior to the vote (found here):

Mr. Dion's English is poor at best. While his vocabulary isn't terrible, his accent is far too prevalent to communicate well with English Canada. Yes, I know Chretien's was worse, but he faced a divided Conservative Party and could pretty much say whatever came to his mind. The new Liberal leader will have no such advantage.

The CBC put it this way (here):

Stéphane Dion, the new leader of the Liberal party, has been criticized for his highly accented English. Some Canadians see it as a roadblock for a future election campaign, as it could hinder his ability to communicate with anglophone Canadians.

The CBC article went on to explore the topic of the Canadian electorate's linguistic expectations of candidates for the job of prime minister. For the first century of Canada's existence, nearly monolingual English speakers such as John Diefenbaker were elected with little concern for their inability in both official languages (Diefenbaker's Conservatives actually won a majority of the seats in Quebec in the 1958 election). But since the time of Pierre Trudeau, Canadian voters have expected their leaders to be true bilinguals. The political parties have responded by nominating candidates fluent in both official languages, such as Brian Mulroney. Jean Chrétien's English was accented but good enough for him to lead his party to three successive electoral victories. Now the Liberals will see if Stéphane Dion proves satisfactory to Canadian voters.

Bilingualism in both of Canada's official languages is not a widespread phenomenon. The 2001 census found that 5,231,575 of Canada's 29,639,090 inhabitants (about 18%) speak English and French. This number does not speak to the issue of fluency. A study of bilingualism in Canada in 2003 found that 12% of the respondents considered themselves "perfectly bilingual", and another 31% said they "could get by in the other (official) language".

Bilingualism is not only important in politics, but in Canada's other great pasttime, hockey. A captain of Les Canadiens de Montréal has high expectations placed upon him, and one of them is the ability to interact with the Quebec French-language media. The current captain of the Canadians is the Finnish superstar Saku Koivu. Koivu speaks Finnish and English, and perhaps other languages, but hardly any French. Although Koivu has played in Montreal since 1995 and been team captain since September 30, 2000, he has still not learned enough French to converse with reporters. This has led to recent confrontations, such as two reported in an article in the Gazette (here), whose sole purpose seems to be to expose Koivu's lack of fluency in French. Jack Todd, the Gazette reporter, ended the article in this fashion:

It is, however, time Koivu learned a little French - enough so that the next time he is ambushed by the likes of Charles Faribault, he can tell him to "go play in the traffic" in the language of Moliere.

In politics and hockey - the Canadian preference is clear.