Official Language Policies of the Canadian Provinces : Costs and Benefits in 2006

This study examines the costs and benefits of the official language policies of the 10 Canadian provinces and calculates how much each province spends on providing services in French to a francophone minority. In Quebec’s case, the report looked at the cost of providing services in English to the anglophone minority. The study is a complement to Official Language Policies at the Federal Level in Canada, a study of the costs and benefits of the federal government’s official language policies, published by the Fraser Institute in 2009 (Vaillancourt and Coche, 2009). Official Language Policies of the Canadian Provinces focuses on the costs and benefits of the official language policies in 2006 as there is no evidence of any significant change in the provincial policies towards official minorities since then. The first chapter presents some statistics on official language minorities and explains the constitutional dimension of the question and the methodology used to calculate costs. The following chapters present the situation in the ten provinces.