The other day I wrote about public/community legal education and the administrative errands I was running all last week. One thing that I didn’t get to was signs. From the first day that I entered Canada for my fellowship year, travelling across southeastern British Columbia and then slowly north through the provincial parks along Alberta’s Cowboy Trail, signs have been a major part of my daily cultural experience–they’re in metric, first of all, and some of them are partly en Français. AAAHHH!

I mentioned metric in my first post (in passing at least). Clickhappy readers who’ve seen that post will have discovered that the U.S. federal government has been metric, as a matter of law if not yet as a matter of fact, since 1975. But, in Canada they’ve got real-life metrication, which pervades nearly everything as far as I can tell so far. This is one of two aspects of Canadian life that I can’t seem to assimilate to. The other is the inability to swipe your own credit card except at the gas station. You can, however, swipe your own debit card, and I have not been able to track down whether this is a symptom of Canadians’ mania for debit cards or somehow prescribed by law.

Bilingual signage is even more fascinating and it is in many instances prescribed by law. Fundamentally, there’s the Official Languages Act and Section 16 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which make both English and French the official languages of federal government in Canada. (In Alberta, the Languages Act allows use of both English and French in provincial government activities, without specifying an official language.) Then, with significant impact on daily life, are regulations under the Consumer Packaging and Labelling Act that require most consumer products to be labelled in both French and English, and the Communications Policy of the Government of Canada, which mandates that federal government signage and communications respect both of Canada’s official lanaguages.

Now, I think I’ll hold my tongue on Canada’s official bilingualism (those who want to try to discern my opinions could look at some of my boring academic writing). It is worth noting, though, that government is probably the biggest producer of public legal education programs and that government signage is probably the biggest public legal education program of all time (and yet, even in the scholarly literature on promulgation, there doesn’t seem to be any recognition of this). So, a government’s policies on how signs will be made can have far-reaching effects on the society it regulates. This could mean something for us in America.