Matthew Hayday featured in National Post on Congress of Humanities and Social Science

Oh, The Humanities!: Canada’s Language Czars Losing their Voice

By Kathryn Blaze Carlson for the National Post, May 30, 2012

Matthew Hayday remembers singing along to Angele Arsenault’s Bonjour, My Friend as it spun on his Fisher Price record player as a child. His parents had brought the album home for him, along with a bilingual boardgame he used to play with his sisters.

The record and the boardgame were both part of an educational kit called Oh! Canada, produced by the country’s first Commissioner of Official Languages and doled out for free somewhere in the order of two million copies. It was 1974 — five years after prime minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s government passed the Official Languages Act and enshrined Canadians’ rights to access government services in the language of their choice. The act tasked the commissioner with protecting the status of both English and French and, most explicitly, with conducting investigations into language-related complaints. (Read the story)