Higgs's legacy is on the line in 2023 as he redefines language goals

For all the political turmoil of the last several years, 2023 could be the defining moment for Premier Blaine Higgs and his legacy as he launches a landmark change to the province's approach to bilingualism.

Higgs's phasing out of French immersion — and its replacement with a new program for all anglophone students — has as its goal something no premier has sought to achieve before: to make everyone in the province bilingual, at least at a minimal conversational level.

"If we are going to be a bilingual province, which we are, why is our goal anything but?" the premier said in a year-end interview with CBC News.

It's nothing short of a historic moment, with Higgs essentially redefining the purpose of official bilingualism.

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For more than half a century, the point of the Official Languages Act, and the political discourse around it, was the guarantee that anglophones and francophones had equal access to government services in their language of choice.

Now Higgs says the act and its impacts require him to make everyone bilingual — one school year at a time.

Benefits of bilingualism in question

The premier is upending the target because of what he perceives as an unfairness toward unilingual New Brunswickers. 

The premier's comments in recent weeks explain why he repeatedly links the language law — which is about government services for all — to the immersion program, a second-language education option for anglophones.

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What attracted the most attention, and controversy, was Higgs's apparent lament that he himself had suffered because he doesn't speak French. 

"We have a lot of people who have the same problem I have," he said at a Dec. 12 news conference. "I've never considered it a problem before, until I got into this job.

"So I'm trying to make it so that other New Brunswickers don't feel they have a problem because they can't speak both languages."

Clearly, as a former senior manager at Irving Oil elected to the highest political office in the province, Higgs has not been held back for being unilingual. 

Rather, his comments seem to convey that he found it hurtful that critics predicted his unilingualism would be a political liability for him.

Only 19 per cent of anglophones speak French

The more striking remarks Higgs made in December, though, were that bilingualism has not benefited all New Brunswickers. 

The government needed to respect the Official Languages Act in a way that "makes sense to people across the entire province," he said.

On CBC's Information Morning Fredericton, he asked why New Brunswick was not bilingual "in the true sense of the word, where we're all sharing that benefit?" 

And in question period, he asked why all people in the province "cannot … have the same benefits" from bilingualism.

Asked in a year-end interview with CBC News to identify who wasn't benefiting from bilingualism, Higgs said he was referring to unilingual New Brunswickers — not just anglophones, but people from either language group who only speak one language. 

"If you're a unilingual person, I guess there's an element of that fact that I think is pretty logical," he said.

Yet the government hasn't launched any initiative aimed at helping unilingual francophones — only anglophones.

And the demographic reality of majority-minority dynamics means Higgs is speaking, intentionally or not, mostly about anglophones.

While 73 per cent of francophones speak English, only 19 per cent of anglophones speak French, according to data from Statistics Canada.

According to economic development consultant David Campbell, unilingual anglophones still do quite well landing jobs with the provincial government — 43 per cent of all positions, in fact.

Higgs 'amplifying a grievance'

University of New Brunswick economist Herb Emery says Higgs is articulating and amplifying a grievance that always comes up when public policy tries to bring a minority group up to the same status as the majority.

"That success [for francophones] has been spun by the anglophones who saw another group coming up … [as]  'there was nothing in it for us, so we must be worse off,' when there's no evidence to show that," he says. 

"It is an irrational response to the situation."

A majority language will "extinguish" a minority language unless there are measures in place to protect the minority, Emery says.

Yet Higgs is "trying to turn the bilingualism issue into an empirical question: is it working or not?," he said.

"Logically, what they're going to conclude is if it's not working to get everyone bilingual or we're not a bilingual province, obviously there's a problem that needs to be addressed." 

Emery says this ignores the principle that preserving the minority language has value because it is the right thing to do.

Professor calls new second-language model a mistake

Higgs is confident the new model — which includes a 50-50 level of instruction in French and English for all students in kindergarten to Grade 5 — will work, because it's similar to a program that once operated in Bathurst.

"The interesting thing about this program is that it worked very well in Bathurst for, I think, 10 years," the premier said in the year-end interview. "All of the statistics show that program worked really well."

French immersion expert Léo-James Lévesque of St. Thomas University says the Bathurst program was for immersion students, not all students, so it's not a good comparison.

A similar model used in Ottawa in the 1970s "was not a success," Lévesque said, with students falling short of the levels achieved by students in immersion.

It also remains to be seen whether all parents will embrace the model. Some already say it's not enough French to replace immersion.

Others may say they don't want their children to learn any French at all.

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Higgs says a single, common French curriculum in anglophone schools will eliminate the streaming of different types of students into different programs — at least until students can opt for more intensive French at the high school level.

"Some may want to pursue languages, some may not, but they'll have equal opportunity, and parents won't be making decisions on day one," he said.

Whatever the outcome turns out to be, the change next September will be a watershed moment for the province and its decades-old debate over language policy.

But its success or failure may only become clear in a decade or more.

"It's not going to fix anything in the immediate term," Emery says of the premier's plan.

The students who enter Grade 1 of the new French-second-language program next fall will graduate in 2036.

How they fare in achieving Higgs's aspiration for them won't be known until then at the earliest — long after the premier has left politics and no longer has to answer for his decisions.