Pardon me. It was the policies that were established in the public service in 1973. Thank you, Mr. Bélanger.
That said, we are still far from being a bilingual country and a bilingual public service. Much political will and many concrete actions are required to achieve a fully bilingual public service. Whatever the school system may or may not be doing now with regard to teaching official languages, it clearly isn't enough. According to a recent article in The Citizen, only one-sixth of all Canadians are bilingual. This is indeed a sorry state of affairs; it is also one that will take many years to fix.
You are probably familiar with section 39 of the Official Languages Act. I would nevertheless like to talk to you about it because, as I mentioned earlier, I'm talking about the perspective of the public service:
39.(1) The Government of Canada is committed to ensuring that (a) English-speaking Canadians and French-speaking Canadians, without regard to their ethnic origin or first language learned, have equal opportunities to obtain employment and advancement in federal institutions;
That's a government commitment in the act. As this committee stated in its 2005 report, a comprehensive, well-funded language training program is the key to achieving a fully bilingual public service. Despite some noble rhetoric, the federal government has actually cut back severely on the funds it makes available for language training.
The government has systematically cut back on language training funding for many years now. Through the early 1990s, the government was spending around $70 million a year on language training. By 1999, this figure was down to less than $50 million. The most recent data available to us indicate a commitment of just over $36 million for the three-year period of 2003-2006. This amounts to a mere $12 million a year, or well over 80% less than the government was spending 15 years earlier, even without taking into account the effects of inflation.
To make matters worse, most of the already severely limited language training available goes to members of the Executive group, who at an average age of about 50, will not in all likelihood be around for a great many years to pay back the investment in their language skills.
Cuts of this magnitude make a mockery of the commitment to equal access enshrined in the Official Languages Act. It also flies in the face of the federal government's commitment to the public service when it introduced the revised official languages policy in 2003 with a promise of access to official language training for every new employee desiring such training for career development. If this commitment is to be more than a sham, the government must move immediately to restore adequate funding for language training.
Members of the Professional Institute feel strongly about this. At least one group--the engineering, architecture, and land survey group--has already raised the issue of language training as a demand at the bargaining table. Federal unions shouldn't have to raise this at the bargaining table. The government should be providing such funding as a matter of course to ensure that adequate levels of service are available to Canadians across the country, and to provide adequate career development opportunities for its employees.
As we suggested earlier in our brief, adequately funded language training is also necessary if the government is going to live up to its commitment to equal access and equality of linguistic communities under the Official Languages Act.
Finally, the system as currently constituted poses special problems for new Canadians, many members of ethnic minority groups, older government employees who entered the public service on a different basis, and those from regions in the country where one or the other official languages is not often used.
For those whose first language is neither French nor English, bilingual imperative staffing requirements mean they must know at least three languages in order to obtain a federal government job. This militates against the government's stated intention of increasing minority group representation in its labour force.
Having said that, the Professional Institute recommends the following.
The departments should review all criteria in positions designated as bilingual, with an eye to ensuring that the requirements it imposes are actually bona fide occupational requirements. The departments should establish an appropriate mix of bilingual and unilingual positions in bilingual regions, in order to strike an appropriate balance between Canadians' right to be served in the language of their choice and employees' right to work in the language of their choice. The government should provide appropriate funding for language training to meet the legal and policy requirements it created. The government should re-establish the role of the Canada School of Public Service to provide training to all employees who wish to require language proficiency in the second official language in the context of their overall developmental plan.