The future of Canada turns on turns of phrase. On three key fronts — foreign policy, national unity and even the aboriginal question — Canada’s capacity to achieve meaningful results in the coming decades will in many ways be determined by language policy. I am, therefore, calling for an ambitious, new-century national languages strategy, led by the federal government, working closely with the provinces and territories.

This national languages strategy must reckon with two important paradoxes at the heart of Canada’s recent linguistic performance. The first paradox is that, while national achievement in English-French bilingual fluency across the Canadian population is quite low — and arguably diminishing — bilingualism as a standard is today, by any reasonable international comparison, nothing to write home about. Only in Canada does the apparent infrequency of perfect bilingualism among political, business and intellectual leaders (an infrequency that betrays an even larger non-bilingualism at the level of the man on the street) issue in absurd compliments paid to those who are in fact bilingual — absurd because the world has fast moved on to trilingualism, quadrilingualism, und so weiter.

Meantime, we in Canada, for lack of strategic seriousness and acumen, have long been stuck in a “bilingualism trap” of our own making — a trap that has us neither achieving real, comprehensive bilingualism nor realizing that it is high time we moved beyond it, and through it. In other words, the road to 21st-century Canadian multilingualism necessarily runs through French-English bilingualism.

The second paradox — one that is true for most federations — is that the content of the education of Canadians, largely the constitutional purview of the provinces, is often sharply at odds with national priorities as defined by the federal government. In Canada, provinces set scholastic curricula principally to meet provincial priorities and in accordance with provincial narratives. National or international priorities may be anticipated in these provincial curricula, but with varying degrees of urgency and precision.

This second paradox is most acute in the area of foreign policy: the “raw (human) material” or “talent” prepared by provincial educational systems — upstream, as it were — is often highly imperfect for purposes of advancing national interests or initiatives downstream, as articulated by the federal government. Case in point: in 2007, Prime Minister Stephen Harper declared that Canada aimed to become a “leader in the Americas.” This declaration immediately begged the question: whence the Spanish or Portuguese speakers in Canada? Surely a country that seeks to become a strategic leader in the Americas must have a critical mass of such trained linguists in positions of authority across all sectors.

Of course, the simple answer is that the provinces lead in education and, were there such a critical mass in relevant positions in Canada (and there patently is not), it is the provinces that would have had to have formed these individuals as competent Spanish and Portuguese speakers. Note to the prime minister: provincial educational policy — including linguistic education — is an indispensable element of success or failure in Canadian foreign policy.

The lesson is similar on the national unity file. If we concede that the federation is stronger to the extent that all provinces form Canadian citizens who are reasonably similar among themselves in their value sets, understandings of the country and loyalty to the state’s continued existence, then it must be true that French-language instruction in English-Canadian schools and, to a lesser extent, English-language instruction in Quebec schools, were key historical policy interventions for purposes of bridging the two solitudes of the Canadian federation. Even if imperfect and highly inconsistent across the provinces (and within provinces), the attempt at essential English-French bilingualism among two or three generations of Canadians, while certainly not “solving” the Quebec question, has until recently helped to populate at least a functionally bilingual national civil service, encouraged a bilingual national political class and, to be sure, raised the prestige and self-regard of the French-speaking minority in Canada.

An unintended consequence of this bilingual formation — a formation strictly for domestic ends — was the rise of Canadian foreign policy influence in French-speaking parts of the world — in West and North Africa, as well as in parts of the Middle East and the Caribbean. But while incidental linguistic competence in foreign policy does not a strategy make, strategic negligence of competence in the key languages of this new century — to begin with, Mandarin, Spanish, Arabic and Russian — will guarantee poor to mediocre Canadian foreign policy outcomes for the foreseeable future in the major global theatres that ought to interest us: Asia-Pacific, the Americas, the Greater Middle East and the Arctic.

Of course, a complex federation’s foreign policy and national unity imperatives should not operate at cross-purposes. As such, where we might aim to drive linguistic competence across a new generation of Canadians in the key international tongues, the import of broad national excellence in French and English should by no means be diminished. And vice versa, meaning that, as mentioned, the prescription for Canada ought to be multilingualism in three or four tongues, with real French-English bilingualism a must.

Let us add that French-English bilingualism in Canada is meant not simply to allow each linguistic group to communicate with the other — or to deliver government services — but also to signal the recognition of the “other” language as legitimate (even prestigious) in the eyes of the country’s leading linguistic groups. Recognition by Canada’s English-speaking majority of the prestige of the French language through institutionalized bilingualism is particularly potent, in this regard, in that it taps into the original intent of the Quebec Act of 1774 to reintegrate, as political and cultural coequals, the people defeated in the Seven Years’ War into the legitimate constitutional-political narrative of the Canadian federation.

If linguistic recognition of the coequal status of French and the French-speaking people has issued in a high collective estime de soi for Canada’s French-language minority, then it might be posited, by analogy, that at least part of the solution to the amelioration of the aboriginal condition in Canada — and specifically, of the meaningful integration of aboriginals into a new-century Canadian constitutional-political narrative — may lie in the revitalization and relegitimation of aboriginal languages by and in the eyes of Canada’s English- and French-speaking peoples. Renewed study across Canada — in provincial schools — of, say, Cree, Ojibway, Inuktitut and Michif — to take but four major tongues — would not only give Canadians a better appreciation of aboriginal realities (and mentalities), but would also revive, lend prestige and re-anchor in the Canadian national geist languages and cultures that were over time reduced to the peripheries of the Canadian project, to the exclusive benefit of European tongues and culture — that is, to the benefit of tongues deemed more prestigious and legitimate.

A Canadian national languages strategy for the new century should, therefore, have two central components: first, consolidation and improvement of national bilingualism as a baseline level of linguistic proficiency for all Canadians; and second, the launching of intense provincial curricular training in three or four of Mandarin, Spanish, Arabic, Russian and, to be sure, two or three major aboriginal tongues, with the goal of creating a critical mass of people across the country who are, at a minimum, highly trilingual — in English, French and one of these languages.

We might all imagine, on this logic, that in the year 2100, when Canada’s population approaches 100 million, an aboriginal woman will be prime minister. She will be perfectly “bilingual” — that is, she will speak French, English, Cree, Mandarin and Arabic with equal poise. And she will have at least the capability to curse and banter in Spanish, Russian, German, Hebrew, Ojibway, Portuguese and Persian. Like her provincial counterparts, she will command a cabinet, be advised by a senior civil service, and be complemented by a national business community of similar linguistic and cultural sophistication, flexibility and openness. Complex, united and potent, this Canada will be a very serious country.

Irvin Studin is editor-in-chief of Global Brief magazine, as well as program director and assistant professor in the School of Public Policy and Governance, University of Toronto.