Abstract
When I was in college, the French-speaking community to which I belonged in Western Canada undertook a campaign to obtain bilingual stamps and governmental checks. Some of us in college thought that the leaders of the community were engaged in a rather silly enterprise; that there were much more important issues to address than bilingual stamps and checks; that indeed the latter were somewhat irrelevant to the well-being of the community.
I wish to thank members of the Villa Colombella Seminar for their valuable comments on an earlier draft of this paper, in particular Albert Breton, Ronald Wintrobe and Timur Kuran. Support from the Connaught Fund of the University of Toronto is also gratefully acknowledged.
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Breton, R. (1991). Policy decisions and the competition for symbolic resources. In: Breton, A., Galeotti, G., Salmon, P., Wintrobe, R. (eds) The Competitive State. International Studies in Economics and Econometrics, vol 21. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-0645-7_6
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