"At a time when nationalist parties are gaining momentum again in Québec and official-language minorities have finally stricken a consensus on a new-and-improved OLA, the opportunity is ripe for any party to show they have a vision for a united country."

Language is a quintessentially Canadian subject of debate. While it is far less explosive today than in the golden days of the Quiet Revolution and the adoption of the Official Languages Act, it still provides opportunities for politicians of all stripes to show what their vision of the country is made of – or, at the very least, to score some points with key demographics of the Canadian citizenry. And election time is the perfect time to see this at work.

Merely days before the writs were dropped, Official Languages and La Francophonie Minister Mélanie Joly struck an unlikely deal with her Ontario counterpart, Caroline Mulroney. The Feds and the province agreed to jointly fund the Université de l’Ontario français, a French-language postsecondary institution set to open its doors in Toronto in 2021.

Green-lit in 2018 by Kathleen Wynne’s government, this project was subsequently cancelled last November by Doug Ford, alongside the stripping of the French Services Commissioner’s Office from its legislative independence. This led to a massive outcry and a series of public demonstrations throughout – and beyond – the province, uniting both Francophones and Anglophones. This was the first of many announcements that would lead to the Doug Ford government’s collapse in popularity by its first anniversary.

READ MORE: Feds, province reach agreement on French-language university

It is no surprise that the Liberals have attempted to turn Andrew Scheer into a proxy of the Ontario premier in the electorate’s mind, seeing as Ford has become a proverbial lightning rod.

Last week, Québec Premier François Legault came out with a grocery list’s worth of requests for the federal leaders. Among these was to subject businesses and agencies under federal jurisdiction, in domains such as banking and telecommunications, operating in Québec, to the Charter of the French Language, effectively overriding the Official Languages Act. In short, such a policy would have the effect to guarantee French as the language of work and the right to be served in that language by those agencies. Not only would this signal an erosion of English-speaking Quebecers’ rights, it could also set a dangerous precedent for other provinces to impose their own (limited, if existing at all) language regime on federal institutions, with dire consequences for Francophones in the rest of Canada (ROC).

Nevertheless, NDP leader Jagmeet Singh, undoubtedly trying to recreate the famous 2011 “Orange wave” in Québec, supported Legault’s request, along myriad other promises for the province in his platform “Ensemble pour le Québec.”

The NDP’s Québec strategy, which also included a television ad where Singh was seen sans turban (a nod to the debate on religious symbols raging in the province), has not been paying off so far. It is now fourth in the polls, on the brink of being wiped out of the province, as the Bloc Québécois – who naturally supported Legault’s demands – is on the way to regaining a good portion of the seats it lost in 2011 and 2015. Bloc leader Yves-François Blanchet has made bold promises for the support of the French language. He even left Québec to visit the Franco-Ontarian community of Casselman, where he obviously fielded no candidates, on Sept. 25 to signal his support for French in the ROC, an unprecedented gesture in the middle of an electoral campaign.

Unfortunately, this year’s election has seen a bigger share of linguistic blunders than thoughtful proposals on the language front.

READ MORE: The Bloc surge?

The week before the campaign began, Justin Trudeau irritated Acadian New Brunswickers by appointing a unilingual Anglophone Lieutenant Governor, breaking with a long-held tradition of bilingualism. Since the campaign has started, both on the campaign trail and on social media, parties have been struggling to convey their messages in both official languages, especially outside of Québec where the Francophone population has been generally ignored. Journalists have complained that the leaders’ French-language talking points during press conferences were often incomprehensible – which does not bode well for the two upcoming French-language electoral debates. The Liberals had to pull the French version of their campaign song, “One Hand Up”, recorded by Toronto band The Strumbellas, from the air after voters took to social media to mock its hysterically nonsensical lyrics. Andrew Scheer made the news for a rather (unbeknownst to him) suggestive Twitter post featuring a baseball bat – a Simpsons reference that did not translate well.

And then there’s the big-ticket item that’s been conspicuously absent from the “avalanche” of promises made by the main parties over the past week of the campaign: the modernization of the Official Languages Act. Both the House of Commons and the Senate committees on official languages, as well as the Official Languages Commissioner’s Office, have studied possible amendments to the bill, which hasn’t undergone a complete facelift since 1988. The Senate committee published a very complete final report on the subject. The Fédération des communautés francophones et acadiennes du Canada, the group representing Francophones in the ROC, has submitted to Parliament a completely amended version of the bill, which was readily endorsed by its Anglo-Quebecer counterpart, the Quebec Community Groups Network. So far, parties have mostly made painfully vague commitments to reopen the Act. Only the Bloc Québécois, and as of last weekend, the Liberals, have voiced clear intentions for the contents of a future bill – among them, examining the powers of the Official Languages Commissioner. The Bloc and NDP have also promised to legislate on mandatory bilingualism for Supreme Court appointments, while the Liberals have only gone as far as committing to appointing bilingual justices.

The language issue, much like Bill 21 or even the treatment reserved to Trudeau’s “blackface”, shows that in some respects, Canada is still very much a country of “two solitudes”. The treatment reserved for the French language on the campaign trail, and the utter disinterest in official languages shown by most party leaders since the beginning of this campaign, has left members of one of those solitudes feeling like second-class citizens. At a time when nationalist parties are gaining momentum again in Québec and official-language minorities have finally stricken a consensus on a new-and-improved OLA, the opportunity is ripe for any party to show they have a vision for a united country. That vision should begin with taking both official languages seriously.

READ MORE: Scheer vows to sign agreement with Ontario on funding French-language university

Stéphanie Chouinard, Ph.D., is an assistant professor at the Department of Political Studies at Queen’s University and the Royal Military College.

This column has been updated with new information from the Liberal and NDP platforms/campaign commitments.