Foreword by Graham Fraser
Page 4 of 15
The Quest for Coherence
Anniversaries are valuable occasions for learning and reflection, and this last year has been rich with just such opportunities. 2008 marked the 400th anniversary of the founding of Québec City and the 20th anniversary of the 1988 renewal of the Official Languages Act. 2009 marks the 40th anniversary of the Act.
The Québec City 400th has been a great success; the proof, for which the organizers, participating governments, citizens of Québec City and visitors all deserve credit and congratulations, has been the festive mood in the city throughout the year. In many ways, Samuel de Champlain, who founded the city in 1608, is a fitting historical figure to celebrate and learn about. He was an explorer, mariner, cartographer and artist; he was multilingual and commanded a diverse crew; he was a courageous warrior and an equally skilled diplomat. More than virtually any other European explorer, he treated the Aboriginal peoples he met with such respect that his memory lingered in Aboriginal oral histories across the continent for the next two centuries.
“Champlain […] was genuinely interested in others and comfortable with their diversity,” wrote David Hackett Fischer in his superb biography, where he credits the French leader with launching three separate French-speaking communities—Québécois, Acadian and Métis. “Champlain’s greatest achievement was not his career as an explorer, or his success as a founder of colonies. His largest contribution was the success of his principled leadership in the cause of humanity.”1 Hackett reminds us of the importance of using anniversaries not only to tell heroic stories of historic exploration and conquest, but also to learn that Canada’s history is built on enduring values of respect and diversity.
As the late Daniel Johnson (Premier of Quebec, 1965–1968) used to say: “Quand je me regarde, je me désole; quand je me compare, je me console.” (When I look at myself, I am distressed, but when I compare myself, I feel better.) Looking at the flaws, failures and shortcomings of the state of official language policy now can be disconcerting—until the current situation is compared with what existed four decades ago.
Since 2009 is the 40th anniversary of the original passage of the Official Languages Act, this gives us an opportunity to examine how far we have come and how far we still have to go to achieve the goals of the legislation. Why pay attention to 40 and not wait for 50? There is the saying “Life begins at 40”, but also something more important. By the time a 50th anniversary is celebrated, most people have difficulty recalling the original event. But a 40th anniversary marks an event that many people can recall. It enables people to recognize how much has changed—and the changes that still need to be achieved. In Chapter 1, we describe the challenges that each commissioner has faced. Perhaps the greatest one lies ahead: elimi nating the contradictions in the implementation of Canada’s language regime, and achieving coherence in language policy.
| In 2008–2009, the Commissioner of Official Languages visited 8 provinces and territories, gave 40 speeches, spoke at 8 universities, gave 90 interviews and appeared 7 times before parliamentary committees and the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission(CRTC). The Commissionner’s legal team appeared as an intervener twice before the Supreme Court of Canada and once before the Federal Court. |
Just like my predecessors, I have been profoundly impressed by the energy and vitality of Canada’s official language communities; against all odds, they have created dynamic institutions in virtually every sector of life, from education and the arts to medical care and from community media to senior citizens’ residences. But also like previous commissioners, I have often been dismayed at the failure of the federal government and its institutions to live up to the spirit of the legislation, and at their lack of commitment to embracing linguistic duality as a value, as a fundamental part of Canadian identity, and as a key element in public sector leadership. Unfortunately, this lack of commitment was reflected in both Budget 2008, where funds for the Roadmap for Canada’s Linguistic Duality 2008–2013: Acting for the Future were left unspecified until weeks later, and in Budget 2009, where official languages and official language communities were ignored. The first suggested stealth rather than transparency; the second, a missed opportunity.
There continues to be a gap between professed intentions and demonstrable results. This 40th anniversary provides an opportunity for a fresh perspective on official languages, which we set out to do in Chapters 2, 3 and 4 of this annual report.
The Act was introduced at a time when language tensions were high. French-speaking Canadians were no longer prepared to accept less than equal status. The law was written to ensure that French-speaking and English-speaking Canadians would obtain service from the federal government in the official language of their choice. If the federal government had not acted to enshrine the equality of English and French in legislation, one can wonder where we would be today as a country.
The passage of Bill C-72 in 1988 brought the Official Languages Act into conformity with the Charter of Rights and Freedoms—but it did more than that. It enshrined the right to work in English or in French in designated regions of Canada: the National Capital Region, New Brunswick and parts of Ontario and Quebec. It enshrined the right to judicial recourse for those whose language rights had not been respected. It laid out the duty of federal institutions to take positive measures for the growth and development of official language communities and to promote English and French. With the protection of language rights in the Charter in 1982, the Act became quasi-constitutional in nature.
Establishing the right of public servants to work in the official language of their choice was, in some ways, a radical step. Concretely, it means that supervisors in the public service in these regions have to be able to read, speak and understand both English and French. Beyond that, employees are able to defi ne what language they choose to work in, rather than have supervisors impose their preferred language.
The original goals of the 1969 Act were focused on delivering services from the federal government to citizens in the official language of their choice and on providing them with an effective way to report infractions or seek improvement if this did not happen. Significant progress has been made towards achieving these relatively limited goals. Over 90% of public servants in bilingual positions have met their language qualifications. Three-quarters of the time, French-speaking Canadians are satisfied with the service they receive from the federal government— progress, it is true, but there is nevertheless a failure rate of 25%. This is unacceptable. No institution dedicated to serving the public should be satisfied with this. Year in and year out, some institutions— like Canada Post, the airport authorities, the Canada Border Services Agency and Air Canada—are the subject of numerous complaints to my office. Even today, 40 years on, the act of greeting citizens in both languages and fully integrating both languages into the workplace is not part of the culture of service in the federal government and its institutions. As we announced in last year’s annual report, we are evolving our ombudsman role in a renewed effort to achieve better results.
The implementation of the subsequent amendments to the Act in 1988 and 2005 are more problematic. The right to work in English or French is often more symbolic than real; the dominant language and culture in most federal workplaces continue to be English, and many public servants who speak French at meetings or write their briefing notes in French are never sure whether their contributions are under stood or appreciated. Even more misunderstood are the 2005 amendments to Part VII of the Act, which imposed an explicit obligation on the federal government to take positive measures for the growth and development of official language communities, and to promote the use of both languages. Those positive measures are critical; pressure for assimilation in official language communities remains strong. Despite that obligation, a series of programs vital to official language communities were eliminated without consultation, one of the most dramatic example being the Court Challenges Program. Similar situations are now under investigation, such as the cuts to cultural programs and to the Interdepartmental Partnership with Official- Language Communities.
In February, the Supreme Court rendered an extre mely important judgment in the case of Desrochers v. Canada (Industry) (often referred to as the CALDECH case) that, as is elaborated in Chapter 2, will have a lasting impact on official language communities. In a unanimous judgment, Justice Charron described the obligation of the federal government to ensure the participation of these communities in the development and implemen tation of programs. “It is difficult to imagine how the federal institution could provide the community [with the] economic development services men tioned in this description without the participation of the targeted communities in both the development and the implementation of programs. That is the very nature of the service provided by the federal institution,” she wrote. “It necessarily follows, as is expressly recognized in the above passage, that the communities could ultimately expect to have distinct content that varied ‘greatly from one community to another, depending on priorities established’ by the communities themselves.”2
The links and connections in Canada’s language policy are often missing. Since linguistic duality is not taken for granted as part of the country’s identity, nor embraced throughout the school system, there is unequal access to second-language teaching in primary and secondary schools, and a shortage of incen tives, exchanges or intensive second-language instruction in post-secondary education. (This issue is discussed in detail in Chapter 3 of this report.) As a result, 40 years after the passage of the Act, the federal government, Canada’s largest employer, still has to spend a substantial amount on language training—training that could be provided more effectively and less expensively earlier, before students enter the workforce, or, at the very least, earlier in their career. This is not only inconsistent; it is incoherent.
Even after 40 years and much progress, there are still few models of best practices. Part of the challenge of coherence is to identify what good looks like. If the federal government fully succeeded in respecting both official languages in the workplace, what would that mean for federal departments, agencies and institutions? We will be looking more closely at this issue. Measuring and comparing complaints from year to year is helpful, but a drop in the number of complaints may simply be an indication of falling expectations. Quantifying how many public servants have passed their language tests is useful, perhaps even essential, but if 100% of public servants have passed their tests and only one language is heard or read in the workplace, what has been achieved?
“Canada’s language policy has never been about ‘forcing the French tongue down people’s throats,’ despite the claims of many who would critique it on this basis. Nor is it about forcing all Canadians to be bilingual. Rather, it is about trying to create the conditions for a viable political community in which both official language communities— English and French—are able to coexist and have access to a full range of government services and opportunities. To make this function, a significant percentage of the population, particularly those working in federal institutions, will need to be bilingual. The challenge is to make these institutions truly bilingual, and to foster a political culture in which those who aspire to such leadership positions consider bilingualism a prerequisite.”
– Matthew Hayday, Department of History, University of Guelph
What is the ultimate goal of Canada’s language policy? The goal is not, nor has it ever been, to have all Canadians become bilingual.
Critics of Canada’s language policy often insist that Canada is not a bilingual country, as if achieving this state would mean that all Canadians could speak both official languages. Indeed, only a minority of English-speaking Canadians speak French, just as only a minority of French-speaking Canadians speak English. The whole purpose of the legislation, introduced 40 years ago, was to ensure that the state would take on language obligations so that citizens were not required to do so. In some ways, to talk of “official bilingualism” is misleading; in reality, Canada has a policy of “dual lingualism” more commonly described as “linguistic duality:” two linguistic majorities that cohabit the same country, with linguistic minorities across the country.
Official languages policy was introduced within a few years of a number of other symbolic gestures related to Canada’s identity: the adoption of a Canadian flag and a national anthem. Each gesture provoked a substantial controversy and a vigorous debate; each, in its own way, became an important facet of Canadian identity.
For all the progress that many federal institutions have made in meeting the technical obligations of the Official Languages Act, on the level of Canada’s identity, linguistic duality often remains an afterthought. Whether it is a matter of literary awards, film festivals or contests to establish the greatest Canadian or landmark, there is often an unfortunate assumption that Canada is an Englishspeaking country, and that its culture and history are created in English. Too often, even in Ottawa, the nation’s capital, public remarks are made with only a token “Bonjour Mesdames et Messieurs” at the beginning and a “Merci” at the end: a gesture that is usually as distant from contemporary communication as a Latin grace at a formal dinner.
Despite public support for bilingualism, Canada has been reluctant to embrace linguistic duality as a key element in its identity. Often, one language or the other occupies the public space—or a neutral shared code, as is the case with Air Canada, Radio Canada International, VIA Rail and other carefully chosen names that work in both languages.
Gestures are not enough. More is required if Canada is to achieve coherence in its approach to official languages. For it is not difficult to find contradictory, inconsistent and incoherent policies and actions.
Access to quality second-language instruction remains limited; there is still resistance to the expansion of immersion programs to meet the demand. Despite the millions invested in training and testing public servants, those tests are not able to be used in schools. Despite the Edmonton Public School Board’s success in using the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) to assess language skills, including the use of international language tests based on the CEFR, there is no Canadian-based standardized assessment tool to measure the extent to which second-language graduates become bilingual. Despite the fact that Canada’s largest employer, the federal government, requires mastery of both official languages for its leadership positions, universities have been slow to provide incentives for immersion graduates, or language learning opportunities for those who have not benefited from immersion. The federal government continues to focus much of its language training investment on middle-aged public servants, who have reached an age where they are often contemplating retirement and where learning a language is much more difficult.
Outside government, national parks, the armed forces and the courts, it is often difficult for Canadians to see any visible signs of Canada’s linguistic duality.
This is the challenge for the coming years: to make Canada’s language policy consistent and coherent, so that linguistic duality is as much a part of Canadian identity as the flag. All Canadians can feel a sense of ownership of Canada’s official languages, even if they do not speak them. It means enlarging the sense of “us” so that all Canadians feel that what is written, filmed or sung in the other official language also belongs to them.
Achieving this sense of ownership, this larger sense of “us,” requires a commitment to equality by the federal government. It means making sure there is accessibility to opportunities to learn the other language, so that young Canadians have access to the other culture; it means recognizing and understanding the complexity of the country; it means fully engaging in the legislated commitment to considering the growth and development of official language communities as part of the decisionmaking process; it means strengthening the efforts to assist in the recruitment and retention of immigrants and refugees into official language communities; it means developing clearer strategies to help the vitality of these communities; it means ensuring that the renewal of the public service takes official languages into account in the recruitment and training of new public servants. We explore these challenges in this report.
The story of four decades of language legislation is one of gradual progress from a set of obligations to a series of values, the most important of which is respect. It means building on a complaint process towards a broader set of ideals. Complaints remain critical to the legislation, and an invaluable tool; the legislation is built on the need to respond to them. However, as American environmental activist Van Jones put it, “Martin Luther King didn’t get famous for giving a speech called ‘I have a complaint.’” The goals of the legislation represent the ideals and values of the country.
Achieving our goals requires a renewed engagement to achieve those that were set out in legislation 40 years ago. With will, enthusiasm and determination, Canadians can do it. That challenge is as important now as it was in 1969.
Notes
1. David Hackett Fischer, Champlain’s Dream: The Visionary Adventurer Who Made a New World in Canada, Toronto, Knopf Canada, 2008, pp. 528 and 531.
2. Desrochers v. Canada (Industry), 2009 SCC 8, para. 53.
