“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.”
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