The Act[3] provides, among other things, The Federal government has set in place regulations establishing linguistic categories (anglophone, francophone, bilingual) for some job functions within the public service.
Departments and agencies of the federal government are required to fill these positions with individuals who are capable of serving the public in English, in French, or in both languages.
The law was an attempt to implement some of the policy objectives outlined by the federally commissioned Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, which had been established in 1963 and since that time had been issuing periodic reports on the inequitable manner in which Canada's English-speaking and French-speaking populations were treated by the federal administration.
At that time, only 9% of jobs within the federal public service were occupied by Francophones,[8] even though French-speakers formed a quarter of the Canadian population.
[9] One of the most important features of the 1969 act was to ensure that federal government services would be provided in both official languages, wherever population size warranted it.
First, it was necessary to update the 1969 law to take into account the new language-related obligations that the federal government had undertaken under Sections 16-23 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which had been enacted in 1982.
For example, former Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff has stated that "Bill 101 and the Official Languages Act are not in opposition, they are complementary.
The premiers of the three Prairie provinces requested, early in 1969, that the Official Languages Bill be referred to the Supreme Court of Canada to determine its constitutionality.
A 1965 poll showed that 17% of Canadians living outside Quebec favored the use of public funds to finance French-language schools.
This proportion had risen to 77% by 1977 (albeit in response to a slightly different question about support for provincial governments offering services in French "where possible").
[14] Within Quebec, changes to the treatment of French-speakers within the federal public service were met with approval mixed with skepticism that this actually helped the unilingual French-speaking majority of Quebecers, who continued to be excluded from all federal jobs designated "bilingual", since by definition a "bilingual" job requires the use of English.
Under these circumstances, there were fears that, because of the higher rate of bilingualism among Francophones, people whose first official language is French would become overrepresented in the public sector.
This nevertheless was an increase over the comparable figure of 1978, when only 70% of the incumbents in posts that had been designated "bilingual" were capable of speaking both languages at accepted levels.
[22] In June 2021 the Government of Canada introduced a parliamentary bill to modernize the Official Languages Act in a changing and more digital society.
In a Winnipeg allocution during his first term, Pierre Elliott Trudeau said that French was selected as an official language mostly because of the important demographic weight within Canada.