David Krayden: The Two Solitudes Are Ideological in Today’s Canada

Commentary There used to be such a thing in Canada as “two solitudes.” It defined the intellectual and social distance between English and French in Canada as captured in a 1945 novel by Hugh MacLennan. It defined the separation of English- and French-speaking Canadians that was so much a part of language laws and federal legislation well into the 1980s. You might say language was an obsession in Canada. Those solitudes are effectively dead today—except perhaps in the minds of the Bloc Quebecois and other separatists—and have been since Brian Mulroney was prime minister. I don’t think Mulroney was much of a conservative, but at least he was able to put to death the lie that the Conservatives—uppercase or lowercase—were somehow inherently anti-French and unable to articulate a vision for francophones....