Régimes linguistiques et fédéralisme au Québec et au Canada

The author examines Canada's two official languages and Quebec's one official language and the government organizations responsible for safeguarding them -- the federal Office of the Commissioner of Official Languages and Quebec's Office québécois de la langue française. The author evaluates how these two government bodies interact within a federal framework such as the one existing in Canada. He assess whether the two regimes are contradictory, or whether they fulfill complementary functions. His analysis is based on the political theories on language, as well as on multinational federalism and the many views on Quebec nationalism. The author also examines the development of the two linguistic regimes (Canadian bilingualism and Quebec's unilingualism) from a legal and institutional point of view. He notes that the Canadian system is a limited surface-area regime only applying within the federal government, while the Quebec system is a transformational enterprise with profound social repercussions. The author concludes that while the two regimes are often described as confrontational, he believes they are rather indicative of a conflict of a political nature between two distinct national spaces.

Master's Thesis

Université du Québec à Montréal

Montréal

2018

v-149p.

fr