scholarly journals A New Deal for OLMC’s?

2012 ◽  
pp. 248-258 ◽  
Author(s):  
Will Kymlicka

While Canada is widely seen as a leader in accommodating different forms of diversity, the unique needs of official language minority communities (OLMCs) are not adequately recognized in the constitution, and often fall through the cracks of the “Canadian model”. Can we imagine a new deal for OLMCs, perhaps in the form of new legislation or even a new constitutional provision that would provide stronger recognition of their national status, their collective rights, and their political autonomy? While I share the political objectives of achieving greater recognition and autonomy, this paper identifies a number of potential pitfalls and dead-ends that need to be avoided in the pursuit of such a new deal. I focus in particular on a) the role of legal categories, b) the limits of international law, and c) the constraints on constitutional reform.

2012 ◽  
pp. 214-228 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rémi Léger

On 11 June 2010, ten leading scholars came together at the invitation of the Canadian Institute for Research on Linguistic Minorities to discuss the autonomy and recognition of Canada’s official language minority communities. In this article, I examine the implications of this workshop for Francophone minority community institutions by emphasizing and contextualizing main ideas and expanding on key proposals. First, I map out and explain how the implementation of horizontal management has increasingly curtailed community autonomy. Next, I catalog and discuss participants’ proposals for fostering greater autonomy for Francophone minority communities. Last, I sketch the potential and limitations of horizontal management.


Author(s):  
Lynne Bowker

Canada is an officially bilingual country, but the only legal requirement is for federal services to be offered in both official languages. Therefore, services provided by provincial and municipal governments are typically offered only in the language of the majority, with cost being cited as the main obstacle to providing translation. This paper presents a recipient evaluation designed to determine whether machine translation could be used as a cost-effective means of increasing translation services in Canadian official language minority communities. The results show that not all communities have the same needs, and that raw or rapidly post-edited MT output is more suitable for information assimilation, while maximally post-edited MT output is a minimum requirement when translation is intended as a means of cultural preservation and promotion. The survey also suggests that average recipients are more receptive to MT than are language professionals.


2021 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jérémie B. Dupuis ◽  
Jimmy Bourque ◽  
Salah-Eddine El Adlouni

Objectives: The aim of this paper is to assess the odds of suffering from anxiety or depression symptoms based on the presence of certain determinants of health for youth living in the province of New Brunswick, Canada, and in two linguistically different Official Language Minority Communities (OLMCs) in the same province.Methods: With a sample of 22,329 students from grades 7 to 12 in the province of New Brunswick, Canada, logistic regressions were performed to assess each determinant of health's effect on symptoms of anxiety and depression.Results: Some social determinants, like family support, social support and food insecurity, were identified as important determinants of mental health status regardless of linguistic group membership or community membership, while other determinants, such as alcohol use, cannabis use and natural environment, were more prominent in one OLMC than the other.Discussion: Social psychology and public health theories are used in an attempt to explain the results. Limitations and recommendations are also brought forward.


2009 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 15-61 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lynne Bowker

AbstractOwing largely to budgetary pressures, official language minority communities in Canada have a great number of unmet translation needs. The use of machine translation presents the possibility of a cost-effective solution, but only if members of this community are willing to accept this form of translation. This paper reports on an experiment whereby members of one official language minority community in Canada—the Fransaskois—were surveyed to determine their level of acceptance of machine translation. Results show that while many Fransaskois are quite favourable to the possibility of using post-edited machine translation, those who are also language professionals are extremely opposed to the use of any form of machine translation. This finding prompts a reflection on whether the way in which translators are trained in the use of technology could be an underlying factor in their reaction to machine translation use, which in turn leads to a proposal for a new approach to integrating technology more fully into translator training programs.


Author(s):  
Tatiana Shchukina

The Official Language Act plays a key role in the lives of Canadians. Its purpose is to ensure respect for English and French as the official languages of Canada in governmental and parliamentary institutions, support the development and vitality of official language minority communities, set out powers, duties and functions of federal institutions with respect to the official languages of Canada. The Government of Canada has decided to modernize the Act to ensure that it continues to serve Canadians in a changing environment. That is why the Government of Canada showed its commitment to promote, protect and update a law by sharing its vision for official languages reform in February, titled French and English: Towards a substantive equality of official languages in Canada. After 30 years since the last major update, a modernization of the Official Languages Act is necessary to allow the law to keep pace with the social, demographic and technological realities in today’s society, which did not exist during the last revision in 1988. The bill recognizes the diversity of provincial and territorial language regimes and focuses on learning opportunities of the first language in minority settings and on learning opportunities of a second official language in a majority situation to improve the rate of bilingualism among Canadians. The bill also seeks to protect institutions of official language minority communities both for the English-speaking minority in Quebec and for the French-speaking minority in the rest of the country, and proposes new ways to better protect French in Canada, including in Québec.  


Author(s):  
Giulio Bartolini

In 1931 Lauterpacht described the Italian scholarship as characterized by a ‘rigid and frequently uncompromising positivist school in international law’. While his statement has some merits, this chapter seeks both to illustrate how this trend emerged from previous approaches and, conversely, to emphasize the multifaceted perspectives that were effectively present in those decades, thus partly circumscribing Lauterpacht’s assertion. Following a survey of the fluid approaches present at the beginning of the twentieth century, this chapter will introduce the pivotal role of Dionisio Anzilotti in favoring legal positivism, even if dissident voices were still present or subsequently emerged. After Anzilotti, other poles of attraction emerged, in particular through Santi Romano and other scholars, who, while still claiming to adhere to the lines of positive law, deprived this conception of several of its original theoretical attributes. Conversely, few attempts were made to elaborate doctrines aimed at reflecting the political ambitions of Fascism, which was unsuccessful in influencing the broad theoretical debate.


Author(s):  
Christian Kreuder-Sonnen

This chapter introduces a constitutional perspective on international organizations (IOs) that foregrounds the legally constituted relationship between authority-holders and authority-addressees. Distinct from the common principal–agent perspective, it paves the way for understanding IOs’ crisis-induced authority-leaps as an assumption of emergency powers—an act defined as the constitutionally deviant widening of executive discretion at the expense of the political autonomy of the rule-addressees that is justified by exceptional necessity. The chapter taxonomizes the possible institutional embodiments of IO exceptionalism according to its constitution, reach, and intrusiveness and highlights its phenomenological differences with respect to domestic exceptionalism. Given the structural conditions of the international spheres of authority in which IO exceptionalism operates, it is expected to rely on the acquiescence of the most powerful member states, to be stratified in scope and application according to states’ power differentials, and to instrumentalize rather than openly suspend norms of international law.


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