TORONTO — AS the United States gears up for a political brawl over immigration next year, one of the concerns shaping the debate will be the fear that English-speaking Americans will be culturally and linguistically overwhelmed by newcomers, many of them Spanish-speaking.

An example of what is in store was the autumn cyberspat between the Telemundo anchor and MSNBC host José Díaz-Balart and the talk radio host Laura Ingraham, who was annoyed because Mr. Díaz-Balart had pronounced a Hispanic name with the correct accent and conducted a bilingual interview in too “herky-jerky” a manner.

For me, reading about the contretemps in the lobby of Canada’s House of Commons was a moment of cognitive dissonance. In our Parliament, Anglophone members speak terrible French every day. Our accents are so bad that sometimes our Francophone colleagues can’t quite hide their winces.

This butchering of Flaubert’s native tongue is the foundation of a larger accommodation that Canada, and in particular English-speaking Canada, has made with a world in which our language may be dominant, but isn’t alone. We are far from perfect — our failings are particularly egregious in our treatment of our aboriginal people — but when it comes to living in a multilingual, multicultural world, we get a lot right.