“A Truly Bilingual Province” 

Radio-Canada reported on 3 October 2025 that Wab Kinew, the Premier of Manitoba, would to see his province become bilingual “like New Brunswick.” Radio-Canada Info uploaded this video to its website and YouTube channel which contains excerpts of a longer interview that Kinew gave to Radio-Canada’s Le 6 à 9 on 2 October.^[1] Radio-Canada Info published an accompanying article and took some snippets of the longer interview where Kinew said:

« Si on pourrait dire, “Oui, il y a aussi une province bilingue à l’ouest,” ben, le Canada c’est peut-être à un autre niveau dans la francophonie mondiale. »  […] « Notre bilinguisme n’est pas juste une étape symbolique. »

In English, Kinew’s statement translates as follows:

“If we could say, ‘yes, there is also a bilingual province out West,’ well, Canada would perhaps be at another level in the French-speaking world.” […] “Our bilingualism is not just a symbolic step.”

The full interview on Le 6 à 9 from 2 October went for 10 minutes and 30 seconds in total; the first half covered other issues like healthcare and decorum in politics in the 2020s, but from around 6 minutes 15 seconds to 10 minutes 30 seconds, the host asked the Premier about some recent public consultations on bilingualism in Manitoba and what official bilingualism means in his estimation. Kinew mentioned that he would like Manitoba to become a member of the Organisation internationale de la francophonie as New Brunswick and Quebec are as provinces, in addition to Canada as a whole. He then said that he wanted to recognise bilingualism “in our laws, like in New Brunswick, which is truly bilingual” – which presumably means some kind of constitutional amendment, given that Manitoba’s laws are already published in both languages and given that Manitoba’s legislature enacted a law in 2016 to promote French in Manitoba. Kinew also brought up “the question of services and being capable of providing access to services in the French language so that bilingualism is not just a symbolic step;” he further described education and access to healthcare in French as “the greatest challenge” and “perhaps there is more to do there.”

When the interview asked what “becoming official bilingual, like New Brunswick in the letter of the law, would do concretely for French-speakers” and “what it would change,” Kinew replied that such a policy would install Franco-Manitobans with “pride”, improve “the quality of services delivered by the government,” and expand French-speaking Canada out West. Kinew concluded that his government could make Manitoba a member-state of the Francophonie within “a few years” but that “this larger project of becoming a bilingual province in law would be a process a bit longer than that.”

This is not the first time that Premier Kinew has floated the idea of making Manitoba more bilingual. Radio-Canada reported in 2023 that Wab Kinew, the New Democratic Premier of Manitoba, had published his mandate letters to ministers and instructed Glen Simard, the minister responsible for francophone affairs, to look at making Manitoba “véritablement bilingue.”[2] In English, Premier Kinew’s mandate letter to Minister Simard instructed him as follows:

I ask that you work with your Cabinet colleagues and through legislative, regulatory and department processes to deliver on these immediate priorities for municipalities: […] Recognize the founding role of the Francophone community in our province, protect their rights and improve access to French language education, health care and services so that we are truly a bilingual province.[3]

In June 2025 when the Kinew government launched public consultations on “creating a truly bilingual province.”[4] The Government of Manitoba also published a pamphlet in May 2025 entitled Manitoba: une province véritablement bilingue.[5] This phrase “truly bilingual” has become a recurring theme. 

What the Constitution Says on Bilingualism in Manitoba

As a practical matter, Manitoba is already an officially bilingual province under the Constitution of Canada though not in quite the same way that New Brunswick is. The Parliament of Canada created Manitoba out of the Northwest Territories in 1870 under the Manitoba Act, a federal statute which became the new province’s de facto constitution and which since 1982 has formed part of the Constitution of Canada as well.[6] Section 23 of the Manitoba Act makes the legislative bodies and courts of the province English-French bilingual:

23. English and French languages to be used.

Either the English or the French language may be used by any person in the debates of the Houses of the Legislature, and both those languages shall be used in the respective Records and Journals of those Houses; and either of those languages may be used by any person, or in any Pleading or Process, in or issuing from any Court of Canada established under the British North America Act, 1867, or in or from all or any of the Courts of the Province. The Acts of the Legislature shall be printed and published in both those languages.

Thomas Greenway, the Liberal Premier of Manitoba from 1888 to 1900, systematically dismantled the Manitoba Act to deny the rights of French-speaking Roman Catholics, nullifying their schools and pushing the French language to the margins. And the Dominion government in Ottawa let him get away with it, too, irrespective of the fact that section 22 of the Manitoba Act guaranteed denominational schools for both Roman Catholics (most of whom in this province also spoke French) and Protestants and that section 23 of the same guaranteed the equality of English and French before legislative bodies and the courts. By 1896, both the Conservatives and the Liberals surrendered on the Manitoba Schools Question and neither supported remedial legislation by which the Parliament of Canada could have overruled the Legislature of Manitoba and restored sections 22 and 23 of the Manitoba Act. The Conservatives went through five prime ministers between 1891 and 1896, punctuated by death and ineffectual senators. Death despatched both Sir John A. Macdonald in 1891 and Sir John Thompson in 1894 (Senator John Abbott had resigned in between in 1892 and died in 1893), and the rudderless administration of the ineffectual caretaker Senator Sir Mackenzie Bowell fumbled from one crisis to the next from 1894 to just before the dissolution of a five-year-old parliament in 1896.

Few Canadians today, even those generally schooled in history, know that Sir Wilfrid Laurier invoked “the Sunny Way” in 1896 to describe the Liberal surrender to Thomas Greenway over the Manitoba Schools Question.[7] Laurier himself had derived the phrase from Aesop’s Fable of the Sun and the North Wind, where the two compete on getting a man to take off his jacket; in this case, Laurier likened federal remedial legislation to restore the rights of French-speaking Catholics in Manitoba under section 93 of the Constitution Act, 1867 and sections 22 and 23 of the Manitoba Act to the blustery North Wind and doing nothing to the Sunny Way. But for French-speaking Catholics in Manitoba, Ottawa’s collusion with Greenway probably seemed like a bleak and cold north wind indeed. Not until some ninety years later in 1985 did the Supreme Court of Canada partially restore section 23 of the Manitoba Act, which had just become part of the Constitution of Canada, by forcing the Province of Manitoba to translate all its previous consolidated statutes in French and henceforth to make good on the text of section 23 and make all subsequent legislative proceedings and statutes available in French.[8]

The New Brunswick Model 

Section 23 of the Manitoba Act mirrors section 133 of the Constitution Act, 1867 with respect to the House of Commons and Senate of Canada and the federal courts, as well as the “Houses of the Legislative of Quebec” and “any of the Courts of Quebec.”[9] However, the Constitution Act, 1867 contained no equivalent provision for New Brunswick. New Brunswick followed a different path to official bilingualism under sections 16 to 22 of the Constitution Act, 1982, which codified a series of rights on “Official Languages in Canada.”[10]  

Section 16(2) of the Constitution Act, 1982 defined the “official languages of New Brunswick” and declared: “English and French are the official languages of New Brunswick and have equality of status and equal rights and privileges as to their use in all institutions of the legislature and government of New Brunswick.” Section 17(2) likewise added that “Everyone has the right to use English or French in any debates and other proceedings of the legislature of New Brunswick.” Section 18(2) provided the corresponding right that “the statutes, records and journals of the legislature of New Brunswick shall be printed and published in English and French and both language versions are equally authoritative.” (What terrible legislative drafting in English, by the way). Next, section 19(2) extended these same rights to the courts in New Brunswick: “Either English or French may be used by any person in, or in any pleading or process issuing from, any court of New Brunswick.” Finally, section 20(2) affirms that “Any member of the public in New Brunswick has the right to communicate with, and to receive available services from, any office of an institution of the legislature or government of New Brunswick in English or French.” The Department of Justice of Canada explains that these sections 16(2), 17(2), 18(2), 19(2), and 20(2) “restate the language rights set out in section 133 in respect of Parliament and the courts established under the Constitution Act, 1867, and also guarantee those rights in respect of the legislature of New Brunswick and the courts of that province.”[11]

Manitoba would therefore not need to pursue enactments mirroring these five sub-sections of the Constitution Act, 1982 with respect to New Brunswick because section 23 of the Manitoba Act – equally as part of the Constitution of Canada as sections 16 to 20 of the Charter are – already guarantees these same linguistic rights in Manitoba. But Manitoba could still draw inspiration from what New Brunswick with the Constitution Amendment, 1993 (New Brunswick).[12] This constitutional amendment added sections 16.1(1) and 16.1(2) to the Constitution Act, 1982 as follows:

English and French linguistic communities in New Brunswick

16.1 (1) The English linguistic community and the French linguistic community in New Brunswick have equality of status and equal rights and privileges, including the right to distinct educational institutions and such distinct cultural institutions as are necessary for the preservation and promotion of those communities.

Role of the legislature and government of New Brunswick

(2) The role of the legislature and government of New Brunswick to preserve and promote the status, rights and privileges referred to in subsection (1) is affirmed.[13]

This constitutional amendment in 1993 introduced a difference in kind to official bilingualism in Canada that went far beyond merely guaranteeing the individual freedom of expression that New Brunswickers could express themselves in either English or French before the executive government, civil service, legislature, and courts. Section 16.1 recognised the existence of English and French “linguistic communities” within New Brunswick, each of which possesses rights as collectivities – not merely as individual English-speakers or individual French-speakers. This amendment also acknowledges that the English and French linguistic communities of New Brunswick each also have the right, as collectivities, to perpetuate their own existence by away of “educational and cultural institutions.” Recognising that language entails not only individual rights of free expression and a fair trial but also collective rights of self-preservation, the legislature and government of New Brunswick must then also take positive steps to “preserve and promote” these two linguistic communities. To my mind, that would mean maintaining the various state-funded cultural institutions that sustain a linguistic community, like universities and hospitals. Section 23 of the Constitution Act, 1982 gives the right of “primary or secondary school instruction in English or French in Canada”, at least where numbers warrant;[14] we should probably therefore read the reference to “educational institutions” in section 16.1 as building on that right with respect to tertiary education and vocational schools.

Section 16.1 became part of the Charter by way of the bilateral amending procedure under 43(b) of the Constitution Act, 1982:

Amendment of provisions relating to some but not all provinces

43 An amendment to the Constitution of Canada in relation to any provision that applies to one or more, but not all, provinces, including

(a) any alteration to boundaries between provinces, and
(b) any amendment to any provision that relates to the use of the English or the French language within a province,

may be made by proclamation issued by the Governor General under the Great Seal of Canada only where so authorized by resolutions of the Senate and House of Commons and of the legislative assembly of each province to which the amendment applies.[15]

Section 16.1 constitutionally entrenched the principles contained in New Brunswick’s provincial statute from 1981 known as Bill 88 into the Constitution of Canada; as Canadian historian James Ross Hurley explains, this resolution to amend the Constitution Act, 1982 originally arose at the same time as the negotiations surrounding the Meech Lake Accord took place in 1987.[16] This probably explains the provision’s emphasis on collective rights; it really does feel like another era and the first step on the path not taken between 1990 and 1992. In this case, a constitutional amendment under section 43(b) to obligate the government and legislature of New Brunswick to promote bilingualism and the English and French linguistic communities depended upon concurring resolutions adopted by the House of Assembly of New Brunswick, the House of Commons of Canada, and the Senate of Canada. The Liberal government of Premier Frank McKenna introduced the motion and the text of what became section 16.1 on 4 December 1992 – shortly after Canadians as a whole defeated the Charlottetown Accord in October 1992 – and the Legislative Assembly adopted it on 8 December 1992 by a vote of 37 to 8.[17] The Senate of Canada adopted its concurring resolution on 16 December 1992, and the House of Commons followed suit on 1 February 1993, in each case without division; Governor General Ray Nnatyshyn proclaimed the amendment in a ceremony at Rideau Hall on 12 March 1993.[18]

Manitoba’s Constitutional Amendment?

So perhaps this is what Wab Kinew and Glen Simard have in mind for Manitoba. If so, then they would first need to introduce a resolution to amend the Constitution of Canada under section 43(b) of the Constitution Act, 1982 and include the text of what would presumably become section 16.2 of the Constitution Act, 1982, applying to Manitoba what section 16.1 did for New Brunswick. The House of Commons and Senate would then have to adopt concurring resolutions of identical wording. The legislative assembly of Saskatchewan and the House of Commons and Senate recently adopted a constitutional amendment to the Saskatchewan Act under section 43 as well in 2022, though on railways rather than on official languages.[19]

Section 23 of the Manitoba Act essentially recognises English and French as the official languages of the executive government, legislature, and courts of Manitoba for the purposes of the individual right to free expression. But it does not guarantee that Manitobans can access governmental services in either English or French, and neither does it recognise the existence of a distinct French-speaking linguistic community which the legislature and government of Manitoba must defend. Manitoba’s constitutional amendment would therefore, if it follows New Brunswick’s precedent, have to add both a section 16.2 to recognise Manitoba’s French linguistic community as a collectivity with a right of self-preservation and a section 20(3) to extend the right to communicate with and receive services from any office of the government or of the legislature of Manitoba in French to any member of the public in Manitoba. The pamphlet Manitoba – une province véritablement bilingue even says outright that all Manitobans should be able to live and to receive services in the official language of their choice and that the French-speaking community should be allowed to growth and thrive:

Que tous les Manitobains et toutes les Manitobaines puissent vivre et recevoir des services dans la langue officielle de leur choix, et que les conditions existent pour que la communauté francophone puisse évoluer et s’épanouir. Cette vision ne se réalisera que si nous travaillons tous ensemble.[20]

The Legislature of Manitoba already adopted The Francophone Community Enhancement and Support Act in 2016, which tasked the minister responsible for Francophone Affairs with “taking measures to enhance the vitality of Manitoba’s Francophone community” on matters pertaining to accessing governmental services in French and on representing “Manitoba’s Francophone community on the boards of government agencies.”[21] The legislation also established a Francophone Affairs Advisory Council and mandated “every public body” in Manitoba to prepare “a multi-year strategic plan relating to the provision of French language services.”[22] The cold, bureaucratic English name of the statute does not capture its essence as well as the French name, La loi sur l’appui à l’épanouissement de la fracophonie manitobaine, which means something more like “An Act to support the flourishing of Manitoba’s French community,” given that épanioussement literally means “blossoming” or “flowering.” (Flourishing is a less literal and more general form of flowering). It has a lively and warm connotation, like of meadow gently growing year on year, or of a garden planted a home and lovingly cared for. It certainly therefore evokes a sense of community and communal identity and the sense that one man alone cannot keep the French tongue alive and that a French-speaking society can only succeed with strong families and institutions backing it up.

Given that Manitoba has already enacted provincial legislation to encourage the growth of French, a constitutional amendment along the lines described above would seem the only option remaining to do more. In any case, Manitobans themselves can opine on that question at various public hearings from 15 to 28 October 2025. These consultations could provoke the ire of English-speakers in Manitoba who, as elsewhere in Canada, might not feel so inclined to support a constitutional amendment which could conceivably make them ineligible for various jobs within the government, legislature, and courts in Manitoba. Others might express concerns over the costs and practicalities of using public money to sustain a linguistic community which makes up only 2.8% of the province’s population under the census of 2021,[23] compared to New Brunswick where French-speakers made up 31.3% of the population in 2021.[24] Official bilingualism along New Brunswick’s model would bring about significant challenges on access to healthcare and policing in French and recruiting doctors, nurses, and police officers who speak French. Radio-Canada pointed out in the aforementioned interview that Manitoba already has difficulty recruiting doctors and nurses in English, let alone in French, which Kinew could not deny and to which he did not give a good retort in that interview a few days ago.

Others might see this as an opportunity to arrest the decline in the number of Manitobans who speak French as their mother tongue, which went from 49,130 in 1991 to only 36,740 in 2021, to right Greenway’s wrong, and to preserve one of Manitoba’s founding peoples and assert the linguistic duality of Canada outside of eastern Ontario, western Quebec, and northern New Brunswick. Premier Kinew himself seems keen on this idea. Indeed, if Manitoba had remained French after the 1890s, a large French-speaking population on the Prairies would have presented an interesting counterfactual to Quebec nationalism and those who changed Canadien-français to Québécois in the 1960s. Perhaps some nationalists in Quebec might make common cause with English-speaking Manitobans who would oppose such a constitutional amendment, if a resolution to amend the Constitution of Canada made its way to the House of Commons and Senate, because on some level, the French Fact outside of Quebec undermines Quebec`s uniqueness. In any case, Manitoba would perhaps have to come up with its own version of English-French bilingualism in a manner less extensive than New Brunswick’s definition, simply because the French-speaking population makes up such a small share of the total and is concentrated mainly in an area east of Winnipeg and south of the lakes.

Conclusion

Kinew carefully avoided ever uttering the word “constitution” in that interview or writing about it in that pamphlet on making Manitoba truly bilingual, but Radio-Canada seized upon his comparison to New Brunswick and his musings about recognising Manitoba’s bilingualism “in law” as an opportunity to bring up the bilateral constitutional amending procedure under section 43(b) of the Constitution Act, 1982 based on New Brunswick’s precedent from 1992-1993. For now, the Kinew government seems interested merely in holding these publication consultations later this month and floating the vague possibility of constitutional amendment as the end goal without actually mentioning it directly. If the Kinew government pursues a bilateral constitutional amendment to make Manitoba an officially bilingual province along the lines of sections 16.1 and 20(2) of the Constitution Act, 1982, this would raise sustain more controversy than the perfunctory Constitution Amendment, 2022 (Saskatchewan Act) did three years ago, given that disputes over language and education have long simmered in Canada and periodically erupted like a stratovolcano. But as of the evening of 6 October, the English-language media has yet to pick up on this story and Premier Kinew’s comments from a few days ago at all because an asymmetrical, semi-permeable membrane separates the Two Solitudes in Canada; information passes from English to French more easily than the other way around.

Similar Posts: 

• Amending the Constitution of Canada
• The Section 45 Constitutional Amending Procedure Becomes a Vehicle for Provincial Autonomism (November 2022)
• Bowden, J.W.J. “What’s In a Name? Newfoundland & Labrador and the Constitution Amendment, 2001.” Journal of Parliamentary and Political Law 16, no. 1 (2022): 243-259.
• Who Decides What the Constitution Is and Says? Quebec Modifies the Text of the Constitution Act, 1867 (June 2022)
• Newfoundland Uses the Section 43 Amending Procedure to Turn Itself into Newfoundland and Labrador (May 2022)
• Some Parts of the Constitution Are More Constitutional Than Others (September 2018)

Notes

[1] Maggie Wilcox, “Wab Kinew veut faire du Manitoba une province bilingue « comme le Nouveau-Brunswick »,” Radio-Canada Info, le 3 octobre 2025; Radio-Canada Info, “Wab Kinew to Make Manitoba a Bilingual Province ‘Like New Brunswick,’” YouTube, 3 October 2025; Radio-Canada Ohdio, “Entrevue avec Wab Kinew, premier minister manitobain,” Le 6 à 9,” jeudi, le 2 octobre 2025.

[2] Thibaut Jourdan, “Analyse: Faire du Manitoba une province « véritablement bilingue », ça veut dire quoi ?” Radio-Canada Info, le 20 novembre 2023.

[3] Wab Kinew (Premier of Manitoba), mandate letter to Glen Simard (Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs and International Relations; Minister responsible for Indigenous Reconcilation), 13 November 2024 [accessed 6 October 2025].

[4] Radio-Canada Info, “La consultation pour faire du Manitoba « une province véritablement bilingue » est lancée,” le 9 juin 2025.

[5] Manitoba: une province véritablement bilingue (Winnipeg : Gouvernement du Manitoba, mai 2025).

[6] Canada, Department of Justice, “Schedule to the Constitution Act, 1982: item 2, Manitoba Act, 1870” in A Consolidation of the Constitution Acts, 1867-1982 (Ottawa: His Majesty the King in right of Canada, 1 January 2024), at page 65.

[7] J. W.J. Bowden, “Well-Earned Obscurity: Review of Barry Wilson’s Sir Mackenzie Bowell: A Prime Minister Forgotten by History,” The Dorchester Review 11, no. 2 (Winter 2021): 77.

[8] Re Manitoba Language Rights [1985] 1 SCR 721.

[9] Canada, Department of Justice, A Consolidation of the Constitution Acts, 1867-1982 (Ottawa: His Majesty the King in right of Canada, 1 January 2024), at section 133 and at pages 33-34.

[10] Canada, Department of Justice, A Consolidation of the Constitution Acts, 1867-1982 (Ottawa: His Majesty the King in right of Canada, 1 January 2024), at sections 16-22 and at pages 52-54.

[11] Canada, Department of Justice, A Consolidation of the Constitution Acts, 1867-1982 (Ottawa: His Majesty the King in right of Canada, 1 January 2024), at endnote 67 and at page 83.

[12] Constitution Amendment, 1993 (New Brunswick), SI/93-54.

[13] Canada, Department of Justice, A Consolidation of the Constitution Acts, 1867-1982 (Ottawa: His Majesty the King in right of Canada, 1 January 2024), at section 16.1 and at page 52.

[14] [14] Canada, Department of Justice, A Consolidation of the Constitution Acts, 1867-1982 (Ottawa: His Majesty the King in right of Canada, 1 January 2024), at sections 23(1) and 23(3).

[15] Canada, Department of Justice, A Consolidation of the Constitution Acts, 1867-1982 (Ottawa: His Majesty the King in right of Canada, 1 January 2024), at section 43 and at page 61.

[16] James Ross Hurley, “The Constitution Amendment, 1993 (New Brunswick),” in Amending Canada’s Constitution: History, Processes, Problems and Prospects (Ottawa: Minister of Supply and Services Canada, 1996), 93-96.

[17] James Ross Hurley, “The Constitution Amendment, 1993 (New Brunswick),” in Amending Canada’s Constitution: History, Processes, Problems and Prospects (Ottawa: Minister of Supply and Services Canada, 1996), 95.

[18] James Ross Hurley, “The Constitution Amendment, 1993 (New Brunswick),” in Amending Canada’s Constitution: History, Processes, Problems and Prospects (Ottawa: Minister of Supply and Services Canada, 1996), 95.

[19] Constitution Amendment, 2022 (Saskatchewan Act), SI/2022-25.

[20] Manitoba: une province véritablement bilingue (Winnipeg : Gouvernement du Manitoba, mai 2025), 4.

[21] The Francophone Community Enhancement and Support Act, S.M. 2016, c.9, at section 4.

[22] The Francophone Community Enhancement and Support Act, S.M. 2016, c.9, at sections 8(1), 11(1).

[23] Nicholas Auclair, Catherine Frigon, and Gabriel St-Amant, Key Facts on the French Language in Manitoba in 2021, Catalogue number 89‑657‑X2023011 (Ottawa: Statistics Canada, 19 July 2023), 4.

[24] Nicholas Auclair, Catherine Frigon, and Gabriel St-Amant, Key Facts on the French Language in New Brunswick in 2021, Catalogue number 89‑657‑X2023015 (Ottawa: Statistics Canada, 22 August 2023), 8.