Performative bilingualism? Canadian language law in the public service

Canada has spent more than half a century building one of the world's most extensive systems of institutional bilingualism. Yet despite legal protections, standardized language testing, and significant public investment in language training, many French-speaking public servants continue to report barriers to using French at work. As part of the MIDAS blog series on language assessment in public employment in multilingual territories, this article examines how Canada's bilingualism regime operates in practice and where tensions emerge between certification and everyday language use. In doing so, we will examine a central paradox of Canada's bilingualism regime: a system that succeeds in measuring language competence while often struggling to create the conditions for bilingualism to live in everyday practice.