The Ordre de Jacques Cartier (OJC), a secret society, sought to unite the political, religious, and nationalist leaders of French Canada. Founded in Ottawa in 1927, the OJC became a forum for reflection and coordination of political action by French-Canadian organizations. It played this role until its dissolution in 1965. However, secrecy around the organization’s activities makes it difficult to assess its effectiveness and, above all, its influence.

Members kept their affiliation with the OJC a secret, even from those close to them. The organization therefore had no presence in the public arena. Instead, the OJC acted through associations such as the Sociétés Saint-Jean-Baptiste, provincial education associations, and, in the Maritimes, the Société nationale L’Assomption. The OJC regularly issued “mots d’ordre” (marching orders) urging these organizations to take action and demand respect for the linguistic and cultural rights of the country’s francophones, using similar arguments.

The OJC regularly urged French Canadians to demand services in French, or advocated for the hiring of bilingual civil servants, as the document on the Lacroix Bill reveals. It guided the drafting of briefs submitted by various French-Canadian organizations to federal royal commissions initiated between 1930 and 1965, including the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism.

The OJC also spearheaded battles on specific issues. For example, it took credit for the success of the campaign to force the federal government to issue bilingual cheques in 1953, and for the initiative to remove the word “Canadian” as one of the possible answers to the question of ethnic origin in the 1961 census.

These symbolic victories were insufficient, however, for a growing number of nationalists from the 1960s onwards. The OJC struggled to retain its members and recruit new ones. The domination of the organization by Ottawa’s French-speaking elite, despite the fact that more than two-thirds of its members were from Quebec, became a source of tension. Disagreement over the OJC’s ideological orientations in the context of transformations in nationalist thought and the rise of forces for Quebec independence led to the organization’s demise in 1965.