Bill C-13

An Act for the Substantive Equality of Canada's Official Languages

An Act to amend the Official Languages Act, to enact the Use of French in Federally Regulated Private Businesses Act and to make related amendments to other Acts

Part 1 amends the Official Languages Act to, among other things,
(a) specify that all legal obligations related to the official languages apply at all times, including during emergencies;
(b) codify certain interpretative principles regarding language rights;
(c) provide that section 16 of that Act applies to the Supreme Court of Canada;
(d) provide that a final decision, order or judgment of a federal court that has precedential value is to be made available simultaneously in both official languages;
(e) provide for Government of Canada commitments to
(i) protect and promote French,
(ii) estimate the number of children whose parents are rights holders under section 23 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms ,
(iii) advance formal, non-formal and informal opportunities for members of English and French linguistic minority communities to pursue quality learning in their own language throughout their lives, including from early childhood to post-secondary education, and
(iv) advance the use of English and French in the conduct of Canada’s external affairs;
(f) clarify the nature of the duty of federal institutions to take positive measures to implement certain Government of Canada commitments and the manner in which the duty is to be carried out;
(g) provide for certain positive measures that federal institutions may take to implement certain Government of Canada commitments, including measures to
(i) promote and support the learning of English and French in Canada, and
(ii) support sectors that are essential to enhancing the vitality of English and French linguistic minority communities and protect and promote the presence of strong institutions serving those communities;
(h) provide for certain measures that the Minister of Canadian Heritage may take to advance the equality of status and use of English and French in Canadian society;
(i) provide that the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration is required to adopt a policy on francophone immigration and that the policy is to include, among other things, objectives, targets and indicators;
(j) provide that the Government of Canada recognizes the importance of cooperating with provincial and territorial governments;
(k) provide that the Treasury Board is required to establish policies to give effect to certain parts of that Act, monitor and audit federal institutions for their compliance with policies, directives and regulations relating to the official languages, evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of policies and programs of federal institutions relating to the official languages and provide certain information to the public and to employees of federal institutions;
(l) enable the Commissioner of Official Languages to enter into compliance agreements and, in certain cases, to make orders; and
(m) enable the Commissioner of Official Languages to impose administrative monetary penalties on certain entities for non-compliance with certain provisions of Part IV of that Act.
It also makes a related amendment to the Department of Canadian Heritage Act .
Part 2 enacts the Use of French in Federally Regulated Private Businesses Act , which, among other things, provides for rights and duties respecting the use of French as a language of service and a language of work in relation to federally regulated private businesses in Quebec and then, at a later date, in regions with a strong francophone presence. That Act also allows employees of federally regulated private businesses to make a complaint to the Commissioner of Official Languages with respect to rights and duties in relation to language of work and allows the Commissioner to refer the complaint to the Canada Industrial Relations Board in certain circumstances. It also provides that the Minister of Canadian Heritage is responsible for promoting those rights. Finally, Part 2 makes related amendments to the Canada Labour Code .

[Joël Godin, Conservative, Portneuf—Jacques-Cartier, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thanks to the witnesses for taking part in this exercise this morning to help make us better and make Bill C‑13 a better bill.

Mr. Taillon, can you tell me, yes or no, whether Bill C‑13 would achieve the Conservative Party's three objectives, which are to stop the decline of French, to protect both official languages and to promote them, knowing that French is the more vulnerable language?

[Pierre Asselin, President, Association canadienne-française de l'Alberta]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Pierre Asselin, and I am the president of the Association canadienne-française de l'Alberta, or l'ACFA. I am accompanied here in Edmonton by our executive director, Isabelle Laurin.

Thank you sincerely for this invitation to appear before you today. The work your committee is doing is invaluable for the future of French in Alberta and elsewhere in the country. The modernization of the Official Languages Act is key to ensuring the act's success.

ACFA has defended the gains that Alberta's francophone community has made, promoted its rights and supported its vitality since 1926—our centenary is coming up. ACFA represents more than 260,000 French-speaking Albertans, a population that grew more than 50% from 1991 to 2021. Despite this major success in Alberta, due in large part to a thriving economy in recent years, we are concerned about the decline that data from the 2021 census clearly shows in the Canadian francophonie. This is why amendments must be made to the Official Languages Act without delay. There is a truly urgent need for action. I don't want the next generation to find itself sitting here having the same conversation.

As a member of the Fédération des communautés francophones et acadienne du Canada, the FCFA, ACFA supports the broad outlines of Bill C‑13 and reiterates its support for the improvement proposals our federation has made. In recent months, the FCFA and all its members have held numerous meetings with parliamentarians and have outlined the improvements they would like to see.

I would like to take advantage of my appearance here to review what we consider are two essential improvement proposals: first, the addition of language clauses and, second, the necessary clarification of francophone immigration policy.

First, with respect to language clauses, when the federal government proposes new funding for specific initiatives, there is no formal mechanism for ensuring that funding is also allocated to the francophone communities. Consider, for example, the recent November 2021 agreement on $10‑a‑day child care services. We need child care services for young francophones here as well, but we are subject to the goodwill of provincial governments, and we need to invest considerable human and financial resources to prepare the necessary submissions. We would therefore like to see an obligation added to the bill to include language clauses in federal transfers to the provinces and territories, along with the option that the federal government may consider dealing directly with francophone communities where a province or territory rejects such clauses. That's important for us in Alberta given our history. The option of dealing directly with francophone communities would take into account the fact that the federal statute may not be able to bind the provinces to these types of language clauses.

Second, we would like it clarified that the new francophone immigration policy shouldn't merely contribute to maintaining or increasing our demographic weight, but that it should also establish a specific objective of restoring francophones' demographic weight. By that, we mean restoring rather than maintaining. An ACFA study has revealed a need for restorative francophone immigration targets to address the demographic decline of the francophonie. The last attempts at doing so were made far too long ago.

Those two changes would make an enormous difference in the everyday lives of French-speaking Albertans by correcting the decline in the demographic weight of francophones and guaranteeing access to provincial services in French. These are essential factors in supporting the vitality of our communities and combating assimilation, which is the aim of everything we're doing today.

ACFA has been working on this issue for nearly six years. On December 8, 2016, during consultations for the Action Plan for Official Languages 2018‑2023, a plan that's about to expire, the Minister of Official Languages at the time, the Hon. Mélanie Joly, asked our president, Jean Johnson, what she could do to have a major impact. When he dared to propose modernizing the Official Languages Act, she personally invited him to share that idea with a full room of incredibly excited people. Since then, within ACFA alone, in addition to Jean Johnson, the message has been spread by the various presidents of our association: Albert Nolette, Marc Arnal, Sheila Risbud and now yours truly. I hope the task doesn't eventually fall to my children.

In the meantime, the House of Commons and the Senate have released many reports, all political parties have made commitments, a reform document has been published, and two bills have been introduced. And here we are once again discussing the modernization of the act and what francophone minority communities would like to see incorporated in new legislation. We've been discussing this issue and sharing our dreams, aspirations and needs for more than 2,000 days now. It's time to stop discussing the details. With all due respect, it's time for our elected representatives to act.

[Patrick Taillon, Professor and Associate Director of the Centre for Constitutional and Administrative Law Studies, Faculty of Law, Université Laval, As an Individual]

Mr. Chair, I want to thank the committee for inviting me to appear.

The federal government does much, indeed very much, to protect and promote French in its institutions. The thrust of my remarks today is not to criticize the extent of the efforts it has made. What I want to focus on is the importance of properly targeting those efforts. The federal government, in practice, has been a very poor partner and has practised very little cooperative federalism in linguistic matters.

In the Official Languages Act, the federal government has stubbornly focused on the two official minorities without taking into consideration the fragile nature of French in its majority position in Quebec, where its decline is becoming clearer and accelerating. Bill C‑13 is designed in part to correct that problem, but I'm quite concerned that the solutions being put forward here remain only partial.

Federalism, by definition, inevitably presupposes the coexistence of several language regimes and policies. To achieve a degree of harmony and consistency, there must be an obligation to cooperate in the greater public interest. In the case of Canada, even the Constitution, which is both the supreme law of the land and the common act of all federal and federated entities, provides for asymmetrical language regimes and obligations.

The case before us today is that of Quebec. As section 90Q.2 of the Constitution Act, 1867, now expressly provides, Quebec is the only province and territory in Canada and North America where French is the official and common language. Quebec is the only jurisdiction where French is still, even today, in the majority, despite its decline.

Like the federal government, Quebec obviously has constitutional obligations toward its historical anglophone minority. It is important to reassure that minority. Neither the Official Languages Act nor the Charter of the French language can alter the rights guaranteed to Quebec's anglophone minority under the Constitution.

That being said, the central issue is the compatibility of language regimes. We must learn to harmonize, combine and supplement each other's efforts in order to refrain from putting Quebec in a situation where it must choose between advocacy of its own interests and its necessary solidarity with minority francophones elsewhere in Canada. We no longer want a federal policy that antagonizes or divides certain communities by pitting them against each other. Bill C‑13 is an attempt to correct this situation, and that's a very good thing.

However, to ensure that this intention or will of legislators is asserted, I would like to take the few moments I have left to outline four solutions that are designed to make the act more harmonious and to combine all these efforts.

First, in addition to the preamble to the act, in which a significant intention is stated, the bill must also include an interpretive provision and criteria. In that provision and those criteria, and in the powers that are delegated to the executive to make regulations and take measures, it is important that the act reiterate the express recognition of the objective of substantive equality and thus of differentiated treatment based on situation. It must also reiterate the federal legislator's intent to halt the decline of French in Quebec and to contribute to—

[Niki Ashton, NDP, Churchill—Keewatinook Aski, MB]

Thank you.

I'd like to go to Mr. Giroux again and go back to the question I asked during the last round.

How do you explain how the new policy under Bill C‑13 wouldn't result in increased costs to attract francophone immigrants from Africa, for example?

[Niki Ashton, NDP, Churchill—Keewatinook Aski, MB]

That's a concern. Thank you for what you're telling us.

I have a final question, which will be for Mr. Giroux.

When you appeared in the Senate, you said you thought there would be two possibilities if the government didn't provide permanent funding to implement Bill C‑13: either the departments would have to make cuts elsewhere in order to comply with the act or they would have to comply with it in minimal fashion.

When we know, for example, that the government's francophone immigration policy has failed monumentally, why wouldn't the application of Bill C‑13 result in additional investments in Africa, where we should open more consulates to promote francophone immigration?

[Niki Ashton, NDP, Churchill—Keewatinook Aski, MB]

Thank you.

Thank you for being here, Mr. Bastarache.

If no additional funding is planned to ensure that justice is rendered fairly in both of Canada's official languages, will it be possible to obtain justice in Canada within the same timeframes in English and in French?

Do you think the bill will be enough to increase the number of services provided in French if no further investment is deemed to be required to implement Bill C‑13?

[Yves Giroux]

That question goes far beyond the scope of the report. In the report, we attempted to estimate the costs to the private sector of implementing Bill C‑13. The costs to the federal government to administer the bill were estimated based on the costs of similar, though not identical, federal programs, particularly at the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, the CRTC. We therefore estimated the costs to administer the bill, and those costs entailed a broad discretionary element. The government may decide to go at it full throttle, as it were, or be less rigorous in its administration of Bill C‑13. That will be at its discretion.

As for the other aspect of your question, I unfortunately don't have any information on underinvestment, the appropriateness or level of investment in minority language communities. I unfortunately can't comment on that aspect.

[Niki Ashton, NDP, Churchill—Keewatinook Aski, MB]

Thank you very much.

Thanks to the witnesses for being here today.

Mr. Giroux, here in the committee, we were told about the underfunding of services to francophone minority communities long before we began studying Bill C‑13. There has been talk for years about the decline of French, staffing problems in French-language schools outside Quebec and the shortage of schools, child care centres and health care. The data shows that major investments are necessary.

However, you say in your study on the financial consequences of Bill C‑13 that its impact on the government would amount to only $2.9 million. Why is there an enormous discrepancy between the needs of the francophone communities and government underinvestment in their welfare, based on what's contained in Bill C‑13?

[Patricia Lattanzio, Liberal, Saint-Léonard—Saint-Michel, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Let me start by saying what a pleasure and privilege it is to have the honourable Justice Bastarache with us today. I will address my questions to him.

Honourable Justice, as you know, Bill C-13 references the charter of the French language in three different places, including the preamble. How do these references to the Quebec legislation violate the constitutional rights of the official language minority, the anglophone community in Quebec, in order for it to fulfill the purpose and the spirit of Bill C-13?

[Yves Giroux, Parliamentary Budget Officer, Office of the Parliamentary Budget Officer]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Good morning, and thank you for the invitation to appear before you today.

We are pleased to be here to present the findings of our report entitled “Cost Estimate for Bill C-13: An Act for the Substantive Equality of Canada's Official Languages”, which we were honoured to prepare at the request of the Senate Standing Committee on Official Languages.

With me today is one of our lead analysts on the report, Katarina Michalyshyn.

Of the many provisions set out in BillC‑13, financial implications arise mainly from the proposed extensions of French language rights to federally regulated private businesses. We expect private compliance costs to implement these rights to be $240 million in one-time costs plus $20 million each year in ongoing costs. These costs arise primarily from language training and bilingualism wage premiums for managers in designated bilingual regions outside Quebec.

The 2021‑22 Fall Economic Statement allocated $16 million in 2022‑23 for initial implementation costs for federal departments and agencies. The $16 million does not cover ongoing administrative costs and was not intended to cover those costs. However, it will allow additional initial implementation activities to be undertaken. We requested details regarding how the money is currently being spent.

Despite a lack of cooperation from the responsible departments, we estimate federal administration costs to implement these rights to rise by at least $2.9 million per year. However, the amount of funding provided is fundamentally discretionary since the activities that can be undertaken in support of the implementation of Bill C‑13 will be limited by the funding available.

Ms. Michalyshyn and I will be pleased to respond to any questions you may have regarding this report or other PBO work.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, René Arseneault]

I call the meeting to order.

Welcome to meeting number 37 of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Official Languages.

Pursuant to the order of reference of Monday, May 30, 2022, the committee is resuming consideration of Bill C‑13, An Act to amend the Official Languages Act, to enact the Use of French in Federally Regulated Private Businesses Act and to make related amendments to other Acts.

Today's meeting is taking place in a hybrid format, pursuant to the House order of Thursday, June 23, 2022. Members are attending in person in the room and remotely using the Zoom application.

To ensure an orderly meeting, I would like to outline a few rules for members and witnesses.

Before speaking, please wait until I recognize you by name. If you are on the videoconference, please click on the microphone icon to unmute yourself. When you are not speaking, your mike should be on mute.

If you are participating via Zoom, you can access interpretation services at the bottom of your screen by choosing floor, English or French. If you are in the room, you can select the appropriate channel and use your earpiece.

A reminder that all comments by members and witnesses should be addressed through the chair.

Members in the room who would like the floor should raise their hands. Members participating via Zoom should use the “raise hand” feature. The clerk and I will do our best to maintain an order of speaking for all members. Your patience and understanding are appreciated.

Pursuant to our routine motion, I want to let the committee members know that all the witnesses went through the required connectivity tests before the meeting.

I would now like to welcome the witnesses.

First, we have with us the Honourable Michel Bastarache, Legal Counsel, who is appearing as an individual. I would note that he is also a retired judge of the Supreme Court of Canada.

It is always a pleasure to have you with us, Mr. Bastarache.

We also have, from the Office of the Parliamentary Budget Officer, Yves Giroux, Parliamentary Budget Officer, and Katarina Michalyshyn, Analyst.

The witnesses will have five minutes each for their opening remarks. I will strictly limit that speaking time to five minutes. If you run out of time, you will have an opportunity to provide further details on certain points during the period of questions during exchanges with the members.

Mr. Bastarache, you have the floor for five minutes.

[Mario Beaulieu, Bloc, La Pointe-de-l'Île, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

First, I’d like to talk about the necessity of passing Bill C‑13 quickly.

Québec has 90% of francophones in Canada, which offers considerable support and a large market for recruiting French-speaking teachers. And yet, French is declining faster and faster. In Bill C‑13, there is almost nothing to address the issue. Furthermore, the federal government will mostly continue helping to anglicize Québec.

Don’t you think that it would be worthwhile to review this bill and ensure that Québec can fight the decline of French? Otherwise, it will have a negative impact on francophones outside Québec.

Do you prefer not to answer?

[Arielle Kayabaga, Liberal, London West, ON]

I understand what you’re feeling. When two levels of government don’t work together to come to an agreement that meets the community’s needs, it’s very difficult. However, we are unable to impose any obligation in this case.

You understand the importance of passing Bill C‑13. French is declining throughout the entire country. For communities like yours, in Manitoba, it’s very urgent.

Could you explain the importance of passing this bill as quickly as possible? We could dig in our heels and say that the bill isn’t perfect on every level, but that would just delay its passage, and communities will pay the price.

[Jean-Luc Racine]

We fully support Bill C‑13, because it goes in the right direction.

As Ms. Anderson said, I think a few changes are needed. The Fédération des communautés francophones et acadienne du Canada made five very clear requests.

The key for us today is to make sure that the bill has linguistic clauses, because that is what will allow us to make progress. Otherwise, we will miss out on this opportunity to have a strong bill.

[Leah Gazan, NDP, Winnipeg Centre, MB]

Thank you so much, Chair.

It's very nice to be in committee today.

I apologize.

I am practising my French, but I still don't speak very well.

I'll ask my questions in English.

My first question is to Ms. Anderson.

The CNPF qualified Bill C-13 as a step in the right direction, but said that it clearly needs improvements. The NDP has been fighting for linguistic clauses to be included in the bill to support improvements.

From your standpoint, is passing this amendment, or these amendments, a requirement for your organization to continue to support the bill? Could you provide some background on why or why not?

Thank you.