It was not until 1960 that the federal, as well as the New Brunswick and Ontario governments, began to question the Anglo-compliance model to the benefit of Canadian bilingualism. Given the rise of Quebec's cultural and political affirmation, the federal government became increasingly active in promoting Canadian bilingualism. For example, in 1963 it announced a major commission of inquiry, the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism in Canada, which called for a new compromise between the two founding peoples. In 1969, it enacted the Official Languages Act.
New Brunswick also promulgated its own Official Languages Act, but no other province followed its example. The government of Ontario opened up to the principle that it will offer services in French where practical and reasonable. In 1974, Quebec made French the official language of the province. In 1976, it adopted theCharter of the French Language (Bill 101) which made French the language of work and advertisement. The Charter also requires that newcomers send their children to French schools.
In 1982, as part of the repatriation of the Canadian Constitution of Westminster, the government adopted Charter of Rights and Freedoms in which it confirmed the equality of French and English in law, statutes, and privileges. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms represents a turning point in the history of Canada's language regime. It gives language rights to all Canadians and makes French and English the languages of citizenship in the country, as well as granting the right to education in the mother tongue to official language minorities across the country (see Section 23 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms).
In 1988, the Government of Canada adopted a new Official Languages Act in which it confirms, in Part IV, its obligation to communicate and provide services to the public in the official language of its choice. It also gives civil servants the right to work in the official language of their choice in Part V of the new Act. Finally, in 2005, the federal government revised its legislation on official languages and added, in Part VII of the Act, an obligation to adopt positive measures to ensure the development and vitality of official language minorities. It also made this part of the law judicable.
Despite these major advances in the Canadian language regime, it will continue to rely on a representation of the language rights and official languages as a compromise. In 1999, in Beaulac, the Supreme Court of Canada challenged the view that the reference to this compromise should be used to interpret the rights of official language minorities. It confirmed that it had a limited approach to the progression of equality between English and French. However, in 2015, the Supreme Court reaffirmed the latter in Caron. In the end, Canadian courts have advanced the representation of language within the language regime as an expression of a right and not merely as a compromise. However, despite the liberal and generous interpretations of the past by the Supreme Court in the area of language rights has also confirmed that it was equally dependent on the representation of language as a compromise.
To summarize, since the founding of the country, the gradual institutionalization of the Canadian language regime has been based on a hierarchical representation of English and French as well as other languages. Because of federalism and its interaction with the Anglo-compliance model and heritage, this representation served to adopt many discriminatory measures against French Canadians, particularly in the provinces. These measures have been questioned by many French-speaking groups in the country and by the Supreme Court of Canada who have contributed to the transformation of representations of language within the Canadian language regime but they have succeeded only partly in discarding the use of the compromise in order to impose limits on language rights.
