Some Canadians tell Carney Ottawa’s spelling protocol should lean British

OTTAWA — It seems some Canadians feel quite at home with the federal government’s preference for British spelling.

Messages to Prime Minister Mark Carney on the matter indicate several correspondents see the affectation as a way of countering U.S. cultural dominance.

A flurry of emails to Carney followed news last December that promoters of Canadian English objected to the federal government’s use of British spelling in official documents.

Dozens of pages of messages were released to The Canadian Press in response to an Access to Information request.

While some writers flatly objected to the federal shift, others applauded it as patriotic.

“In our effort to distance ourselves from our acquisitive, abusive southern neighbours, I support this move,” wrote one person.

“Always neighbours, never neighbors.”

In a Dec. 11 letter that touched off the public debate, five linguistics experts and an editors association representative pointed to the use of British spelling — such as utilisation, globalisation and catalyse (instead of utilization, globalization and catalyze) — in government documents, including the 2025 federal budget.

Canadian spelling is used widely and consistently in Canada — in book and magazine publishing, in newspapers and other media, and in the federal and provincial governments and their legislatures, the letter said.

“If governments start to use other systems for spelling, this could lead to confusion about which spelling is Canadian,” it added.

The experts asked the Prime Minister’s Office, the Canadian government and Parliament to stick to Canadian English spelling, “which is the spelling they consistently used from the 1970s to 2025.”

A widely published Canadian Press story about the letter spawned international coverage of the spelling spat.

Standard Canadian English is unique among the varieties of English around the world because, while it is influenced by its geographic proximity to the U.S., it has features distinct from both U.S. and U.K. English, the letter from the experts noted.

That nuance seemed to have been lost on some of those who felt compelled to write to Carney.

“The British spelling is more Canadian than U.S. spelling,” reads one message. “If we don’t protect our Canadian spelling, by favouring the British spelling, eventually our spelling with mimic the U.S.”

The names of the email writers were stripped from the newly released records in keeping with a privacy exemption in the access law.

Another message urged Carney to keep the British spelling “as this is what I grew up with and I quite like the British tradition rather than an American bastardized one.”

The experts’ key point about Canadian acceptance of “-ize” endings also appeared to elude at least one federal official.

In a response to one message expressing a preference for British spelling over American spelling, an officer who handles correspondence for the prime minister pointed to a 2017 blog post on a government website about why Canadian spelling is different.

The post noted that language evolves and that Canadians now share some spelling preferences with their neighbours to the south.

“Take the endings of verbs like ‘organize,’ ‘civilize’ and ‘specialize,’ for example: the majority of us favour the traditional spelling ‘-ize’ (the only spelling used in the U.S.) rather than the variant ‘-ise’ now so popular in British English.”

Several people simply told Carney to stick to Canadian English.

“Something is seriously wrong with our political ‘leaders,'” one person wrote. “We are supposed to be enthusiastically pro-Canadian whenever possible, but not in how we spell our words. Who thought this one up? Fools!”

Another correspondent favoured Canada spelling as a reflection of national identity and consistency in government communications, and alluded to the deep tensions with the United States over U.S. tariffs and threats to Canadian sovereignty.

“Preserving these standards is especially important during this momentous time for our country.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Aug. 3, 2026.

Jim Bronskill, The Canadian Press