On this date in 1969 the Official Languages Act gave French equal status to English in the federal government.

Frye on the influence of French Canadian culture on English Canadian culture:

I believe that the French Canadians discovered their own identity first.  The French Canadian intellectuals and writers, including Quebecers, understood, almost from the beginning, what their function and role should be.  They should be the defenders and the heralds of a language and a culture in a continual state of siege; it is precisely this which allowed them to define, with maximum clarity, their own identity.  English Canadian writers, when they in turn discovered their identity in the 1960s, did it, as it were, by rebound, as a reaction to the problems posed by the French Canadians. (CW 24, 45)