In December, a group of Canadian linguistics experts wrote to Prime Minister Mark Carney (PDF) to express concern that the federal government had started using British spelling rather than Canadian spelling, in particular "-ise" rather than "-ize" endings, in recent publications, notably the budget.
One might suppose that this change was influenced by Carney's many years in England, both as a graduate student and as head of the Bank of England.
But my theory is simpler: Microsoft Word, the default word processing program for almost everyone, sets its "English (Canada)" language setting to simply allow both US and UK spellings. So if you're using "Canadian" spelling, it will allow both globalization and globalisation (I am using Word's "Canadian" language to type this and neither of them got a squiggly red line).
So the result is that in Word's "Canadian" setting one can use American spelling (e.g. labor – also no squiggly red line as I type) and not notice it. In a supposedly "elbows up" era when we are trying to reduce American influence, the only way to detect accidental US spelling is to set your document to "English (United Kingdom)." I suspect that's what federal public servants have been directed to do. And public servants who aren't particularly aware of Canadian spelling are simply following the spelling they're directed to by the UK setting.
The actual solution is for the Canadian government to pressure Microsoft to introduce a truly Canadian language setting. There are 40 million people in Canada – it's surely reasonable to cater properly to us. And, as the letter indicates, sufficient reference resources exist in order to set that up.
Coda: as an editor, a word of advice to writers who mostly submit to Canadian publications – set your default language to "English (Canadian)" rather than the factory default "English (United States)." That way your spellcheck won't put a squiggly red line under Canadian spellings when you write a piece. It's still up to you to know Canadian spelling, of course, until Word creates a true Canadian dictionary.
This post was originally published in my newsletter.