Official Languages Committee on Oct. 18th, 2011

[Mauril Bélanger, Liberal, Ottawa—Vanier, ON]

One moment, Mr. Chair.

I would not want you to interpret the decision to mean that all pending motions would be abandoned.

[The Chair, Conservative, Michael Chong]

No, no, that's not what I've said.

You've given me notice of motion. Provided it's not a duplicate of an earlier motion either adopted or defeated by the committee, you are within your rights to move that motion at any meeting, at any time--

[Mauril Bélanger, Liberal, Ottawa—Vanier, ON]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Michael Chong]

--or to continue debate on a motion already moved that has not been yet disposed of by the committee. Okay?

[Mauril Bélanger, Liberal, Ottawa—Vanier, ON]

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Conservative, Michael Chong]

I was just asking whether or not you wanted to move these motions. I assume you don't, so we're going to move on to the first item on our agenda....

Yes, Monsieur Godin.

[Yvon Godin, NDP, Acadie—Bathurst, NB]

Since we just lost 15 minutes, I propose that the meeting adjourn at 10:00 a.m. rather than 9:50 a.m.

[The Chair, Conservative, Michael Chong]

So Monsieur Godin has moved a motion that the committee adjourn at--

[Yvon Godin, NDP, Acadie—Bathurst, NB]

And if we need to recall the witnesses, we can do it later. We'll make that decision together.

[The Chair, Conservative, Michael Chong]

Monsieur Godin has moved a motion that the committee adjourn at 9:50.

[Yvon Godin, NDP, Acadie—Bathurst, NB]

It would be at 10 o'clock for the report of the commissioner.

[The Chair, Conservative, Michael Chong]

The motion is to adjourn at 10 o'clock today. At a future date, if we want to call these witnesses, we can bring them back to appear.

Seeing that there's no debate on this motion, I'll call the question.

(Motion agreed to)

We'll now move to the first item on our agenda today, which is our two witnesses. We have Mr. Jean-Pierre Gauthier, senior director of the Official Languages Secretariat, and Mr. Tom Scrimger, assistant deputy minister for Citizenship and Heritage.

Welcome to you both.

You have 30 minutes for your presentation.

[Tom Scrimger, Assistant Deputy Minister, Citizenship and Heritage, Department of Canadian Heritage]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

We will try to be as brief as possible, given the change in time in today's meeting, to leave time for committee members to ask questions.

Mr. Gauthier, to my left, will make a presentation on the Roadmap. We hope that it will provide enough context for all the committee members. I am sure that some members are already fairly familiar with the Roadmap that was presented in 2008, but others may not be familiar with it.

Without any further pretext, I'll turn the mike over to my colleague to go through the presentation.

[Jean-Pierre Gauthier, Senior Director, Official Languages Secretariat, Department of Canadian Heritage]

Thank you, Tom.

Good morning, everyone. Good morning, Mr. Chair.

If you wish, I suggest that this morning we provide an overview of the various concepts that might be helpful to you in your study. Obviously, I will spend a little more time talking about the Roadmap itself.

We have divided the presentation that you have in front of you into three parts. The first part deals mainly with statistical data and clarifies some figures. Obviously, we could talk about statistics for two hours if we wanted to. I will just provide an overview, which will help direct and structure today's discussions and perhaps the discussions you'll have later as part of your study. Then I will provide a quick overview of the legal framework for language rights to provide a solid foundation to all committee members for your upcoming study. Lastly, we will address the Roadmap more specifically. I will explain what it's about, how it came about and what it contains. My overview will be quick so that you have as much time as possible for questions.

If I may, I'll start with the statistical data on page 3. Basically, a Statistics Canada census showed that there are approximately 200 mother tongues, of which approximately 90 are spoken. That's the linguistic environment of the Canadian population.

I would like to go off on a short tangent about definitions. Without going into detail, I would like to say that we use different terms when we speak about languages. There is the mother tongue. There is the language spoken at home. And there is another important concept, which is the first official language spoken. So when we talk about statistics, make sure you pay particular attention to what exactly we are talking about. We simply adapt the numbers to the circumstances that are the most relevant. That's the intention behind the various definitions.

We know that 98% of Canadians speak one of the two official languages. Close to three quarters speak English and one quarter speak French as their first official language spoken.

On this page, we are also providing a few details, some more specific information about official-language minority communities. There are close to a million francophones living outside Quebec. A little over 500,000 are in Ontario, which makes it the largest concentration of francophones living outside Quebec in a single province. There are approximately 235,000 in New Brunswick, which accounts for about a third of the population of that province. As for the other provinces and territories in Canada, excluding Quebec, francophones represent less than 2% of the local population.

As for anglophones in a minority situation in Quebec, they represent a little over 900,000 people. Basically the size of the francophone minority communities outside Quebec and that of the anglophone minority community in Quebec is comparable.

The next page provides some trends to give you an idea of the situation over a long period of time. We are talking here about a period of 45 years, from 1961 to 2006—the most recent census data dates back to 2006.

The proportion of francophones in Canada—those whose mother tongue is French—went from about 28% to 22%, which is a decrease. There has also been a decrease in English as a mother tongue, which went from 58.5% to 57.8%. The difference can be explained mostly by the growth in the allophone population, that is people whose mother tongue isn't English or French. It went from 13% to 20% during the same period. So this gives you the trends we are seeing in the Canadian population.

The next page deals with bilingualism. The first two or three pages we just discussed covered the individual's mother tongue.

We are now going to talk about people who speak both official languages. There is a small table that summarizes the level of bilingualism among the population. You can easily see that minority communities are by far the most bilingual in Canada, which is understandable. So over 80% of the francophone population living outside Quebec is bilingual, and two thirds of the minority anglophone population living in Quebec is bilingual. So we find a very large proportion of bilingualism in these minority populations. The level of bilingualism in Canada is 17%. The percentage has grown since 1961. At the time, it was 12%.

Several polls have been done over the years to determine how much support there is for bilingualism. The most recent one was from September, and it's the one I indicated here. It says that about 70% of Canadians support bilingualism and that a quarter of Canadians think that being bilingual is an asset. This information has been verified in other polls. We have already seen polls that show a level of support for bilingualism between 70% and 80%, depending on the version.

I don't want to dwell on statistics. I won't give you more than that. Obviously, we can always give you more statistical information if you wish. All sorts of very interesting breakdowns can be done. But I'll leave you with two maps.

The first map provides the population of the various provinces and territories. The populations are broken down by official language. This shows you the size of the various communities in each province.

The second map, which is a little more colourful with its shades of beige and brown, pinpoints the minority communities. That means, that in Quebec we're talking about anglophones, and outside Quebec, that means francophones. This provides some idea of the concentration of the communities.

As a second part, I'd like to spend a bit of time talking about the legislative framework, basically to give you a very quick overview to map out a little bit where linguistic rights come from.

On page 8, what you see is that the bilingualism of Canada started in 1867 with the constitutional act at that time, when Parliament and the court were deemed to operate both in French and English. This equally applied at that time to the Quebec legislative assembly and to the court system in Quebec too.

So there's the beginning of the official languages, with the 1867 constitutional act. Of course, the big marker is in 1969, when the Official Languages Act was adopted. That's more than 40 years ago. It basically provided rights to get services from the federal government in French or English. This is the beginning of the regime we are under. It also created, for instance, a commissioner of official languages at that time.

In 1982, with the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, English and French were officially presented as being official languages of Canada; that's section 16 of the charter. It also provides a number of provisions with respect to linguistic rights, including section 23, about rights to an education in French or English in Canada.

The next big step in the evolution of the framework is found in 1988, when we introduced, under part VII, the obligations to support the vitality and the development of minority communities as well as the promotion of the full recognition and use of French and English in Canada.

Then in 2005, about six years ago, that new part of the act from 1988 called upon departments to assume an obligation to take positive measures to implement the objectives and provisions of that part, and it made the part subject to legal recourse, if individuals feel that the government is not complying with its obligations under these provisions.

In a nutshell, this gives you a sense of the big steps that lead to where we are today.

On the next page, I'm going to spend a couple of minutes more about the Official Languages Act itself. It pursues essentially three main objectives.

The first objective of the act is to ensure equality of status and of rights between French and English. That's by and large one way to present one key objective of the Official Languages Act.

The second thing it does is provide for the powers, duties, and functions of the various institutions, especially in terms of what they have to do to assume and fulfill their obligations towards official languages.

The third of the set of objectives is part VII, in essence: to preserve and foster the development of the English and French minority communities as well as the equal status of French and English in Canadian society.

In a nutshell, those are the three main objectives of the Official Languages Act.

One thing to keep in mind is that the act is aimed essentially at the federal government. In general it does not apply to provinces, municipalities, or, by and large, to the private sector. It is an act that places obligations largely upon the federal government.

Provinces and territories have their own regimes. These vary. For instance, New Brunswick is officially bilingual under the Constitution; Quebec has adopted French as its sole official language; the Northwest Territories, the Yukon, and Nunavut have adopted not only French and English, but also some aboriginal languages as well, as their official languages. So regimes may vary at the provincial level.

What I've presented on the next page.... There I could have spent more time, but for the sake of getting to the roadmap faster, I will quickly just highlight the various parts of the act. It's important because, as many of you know, the debate on official languages often refers in coded language to “part IV”, “part VII”, and so on. I thought I would take a couple of minutes to highlight the key parts. Eventually, as we discuss these things, we will fall back into using that jargon—and we will do so, because it's stronger than our will, I guess—which we use all the time.

I would suggest we pay attention to parts III and VII. Those are the substantive rights provisions, I would submit. Of course, there are parts I and II, but those you'll hear most about are parts III, IV, V, VI, and VII.

Part III basically concerns the administration of justice. It's the right people have before a federal court or tribunal to proceed in French or in English.

Part IV is by and large the part under which the federal institutions of government have obligations to offer services in French and English, depending on the situation, depending on the location of the office, and largely depending on the size of the minority population in that region. But it does provide a baseline right for Canadians to have access to federal government services in the language of their choice.

Part V is more internal to the public service. It is the right of public servants to work in French or English, and again that depends on their location. If they're in a headquarters office or if they are in a bilingual region, their rights are different from those if they are in a unilingual region, for instance.

Part VI is basically a technical part, I would submit, which ensures or provides that the public service and the members of the public service reflect the makeup of the population. It's to ensure that there is a connection between the demographic composition of the general population and the public service.

Part VII, which I have already mentioned a couple of times, is a key part, and you'll hear that expression “part VII” often.

I'll just spend a minute on the next page. There are a few key federal institutions, and by that I mean that they hold special roles under the Official Languages Act. The act applies to all federal institutions in terms of its obligations—there's no doubt about that—but this handful of institutions has a special role to play.

Treasury Board is one of them. They're responsible for the language of service, for the language of work in the public service, and, for part VI, the representation of the two linguistic groups in the public service.

The Department of Justice provides advice on the interpretation of the Official Languages Act, so they're very key in terms of assisting all departments and institutions in complying with their obligations.

At the Department of Canadian Heritage we basically do two things. We have a set of programs inside the department whereby we provide support to the objectives of the act directly, but we also have—and this is my group—an overarching role in coordinating other departments. That's an interdepartmental role that is being played at two different levels. I don't want to get into technicalities at this time, but it does mean that this department plays on two levels: it plays with respect to its suite of programs, but also it plays a role across government as well.

As to the Commissioner of Official Languages, I'm sure you're familiar with him.

Some historical information is provided on page 12 of the Roadmap. It covers the federal government's recent official languages strategies. We obviously haven't provided the entire 40-year overview. To give you some background, the first official languages action plan was put in place in 2003 for five years, so it ended in 2008. The Roadmap that started in 2008 and ends in 2013 is the second action plan and is the current one.

To focus a little on the current Roadmap, so the one for 2008-2013, it involves an investment of $1.1 billion over five years. The current Roadmap is planned to end on March 31, 2013. When we look at its various components, the Roadmap includes about 30 initiatives. Actually, there are 32 initiatives for delivering the whole plan. It is applied by about 15 federal departments and agencies. It pursues two main objectives: strengthening the vitality of the official language minority communities and promoting the use of English and French to the general population.

The pie chart on page 14 gives you a general idea of the size of the various investments made under the Roadmap. I will let you take a look at it, but you will quickly see that education has the lion's share. Health is also a large component. There are a number of other aspects. This basically tallies with the objectives and areas of activity under the Roadmap.

The next page describes the 15 departments and agencies included in the Roadmap. I have put them in groups. The first group includes the departments and agencies that deal with economic issues. The departments of Canadian Heritage, Immigration, Justice and Health have fairly obvious fields of activity. The next three departments and agencies, namely, Public Works, the National Research Council and the Canada School of Public Service, focus much more on initiatives that benefit all Canadians, namely, promoting linguistic duality. The last two, the secretariat I run and the Office of the Chief Human Resources Officer, which is part of the Treasury Board Secretariat, deal mainly with government infrastructure and the coordination of all those activities.

I think the last point on this page is very important. The Roadmap is a subset. In reality, the federal government's investment in official languages is much larger than the Roadmap. All departments are subject to the Official Languages Act. They assume the same obligations, but they will not be able to carry them out in the same way. This depends on their mandate, but they all have obligations and must all try hard to accomplish what they need to do. In particular, I'm thinking of the active measures to promote English and French and of the vitality of official language minority communities.

So the Roadmap is a hard core, if you will, of particularly relevant government activities that have been put together to create a coherent whole. However, this doesn't represent all the federal government's investments in official languages.

I would now like to give you an overview of the type of dialogue we maintain. As the committee is aware, we are at a point in the Roadmap when the time is right to start thinking about the future. So the first step we are taking is to pay attention and listen to the stakeholders, particularly the official language minority communities, to try to understand and determine what priorities and areas for action we should focus on for the future.

With this page, I simply wanted to show you what we are doing. Our consultations are divided along three lines. There is the interdepartmental discussion, where we consult among colleagues. This starts with the 15 Roadmap partners and it can, and does, reach beyond those members. We also have intergovernmental discussions. A number of Roadmap actions call on the provinces. I'm thinking of education and health. So these are initiatives that we discuss with our colleagues from the provinces and territories. There is also the whole non-governmental community, namely, the community representatives. We have been listening to what they have to say for close to a year now. We use occasions, events, meetings and gatherings to pay attention to what is being said and to engage in this dialogue.

We are also very much interested in the committee's work, which is along the same lines, and will allow us to continue to listen attentively to what the communities want.

The last page of the presentation provides an overview. In 2011, we were in our preparatory phase. We did a midterm review. It was a management review to see how we had done to that point.

As I just explained, we started dialogues and discussions. Formal summative evaluations of the various programs are currently under way. We are proceeding with research and analysis.

Next year, we will have to synthesize the research and draft proposals to the government and to cabinet.

In 2013, we will look to the future. The Roadmap for Canada's Linguistic Duality will have expired and we will probably have to take steps for implementation at that time.

This completes the presentation. It was an overview.

Thank you for your attention.

[The Chair, Conservative, Michael Chong]

Thank you, Mr. Gauthier.

Before we go to Monsieur Godin, in terms of the 2011-12 work plan the department has for reviewing the roadmap, do you have the exact months? We're undertaking our study here and it would be helpful for the analyst if you had an idea of when the items on page 17 are taking place. I know it's in 2011 or 2012, but do you have any--

[Jean-Pierre Gauthier]

I guess we're aiming to get back to making recommendations and proposals sometime in the second part of 2012. And of course we will be paying a lot of attention to the work of the committee, and we'll adjust ourselves accordingly to make sure that we don't miss the opportunity of taking advantage of your work and of your conclusions.

[The Chair, Conservative, Michael Chong]

Good. Thank you for your presentation.

We have 32 minutes for questions and comments from the committee members.

Let's start with Mr. Godin.

[Yvon Godin, NDP, Acadie—Bathurst, NB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I would like to welcome our two witnesses, Mr. Gauthier and Mr. Scrimger. I hope I am pronouncing your name right.

I really like that we devoted half an hour to your explanations. It gave us the opportunity to hear your point of view.

I have a few questions, and so do my colleagues. We prepared these questions so we could get answers. If you don't have the answers, you can send them to us later.

The Department of Canadian Heritage is currently preparing a midterm report that will include the government perspective and the community perspective on the implementation of the Roadmap for Canada's Linguistic Duality. My questions are as follows: When will this report be ready? What is the distribution plan? Will the report be made public? How does the department intend to make sure that the community perspective section has actually been validated by the communities?

[Tom Scrimger]

Thank you for your questions.

First, we want to draft our report and submit it to the minister by the end of 2011. The minister will also consult with his colleagues.

The public communication plans have not yet been determined, but I think the most important part of the matter is the consultation with the communities. Canadian Heritage maintains an ongoing dialogue.

We take every opportunity to strengthen the dialogue to ask questions. I just sent letters to several community organizations to discuss priorities and the progress of the Roadmap for Canada's Linguistic Duality. The minister asks the same questions when he meets with the groups.

It's certainly a topic of discussion for us and something we are always considering. We most certainly want to be in a good position to represent the concerns of the communities in our report to our minister. I think that there are several ways of interacting with the communities to ensure that we are really able to reflect their concerns.

[Jean-Pierre Gauthier]

Mr. Chair, I would like to add a few observations, if I may.

For the midterm review, I think it's important to clarify the goals of the exercise we are conducting. The purpose of the exercise is to provide an account of what has been accomplished. It is a management step for reviewing the implementation and how we have delivered the Roadmap. It's a verification or review step that is focused more on the management of the Roadmap than on the creation of a document that would recommend public policy themes, for example.

The information that we use is already part of the public domain through the annual reports of Canadian Heritage. If you take a look at the departmental reports on performance that were published in late spring, unless I'm mistaken, you will find appendix 5. It isn't in the paper version, but is available online.

This appendix lists the 32 initiatives I just spoke about. It provides very specific details about the outlays that have been made during the year compared with the expected outlays. There is also space for comments at the end of the document and notes from the various departments to explain what happened over the year. So this is a yearly process, and part of our process is more a way of taking stock at the midterm based on this information.

We consulted the official language minority communities fairly thoroughly in the summer and fall. To ensure that we fully understood what they were telling us, my team is drafting a report right now that will summarize what we collected, both through a brief survey this summer and discussion groups this fall. We will send it to them to ensure that it truly reflects what they told us.

And, as my assistant deputy minister said, our discussions are ongoing with these communities. I can say that we trust that we have fully understood the messages.

[Yvon Godin, NDP, Acadie—Bathurst, NB]

So if I've understood correctly, the midterm report will not appear in an actual report, but instead we will have to go on the Internet to find bits and pieces, so a bit from the spring here, a bit from the summer there. We'll have to do research to find out where the minister is at rather than having a public report that everyone would have access to.

[Jean-Pierre Gauthier]

Right now we are doing the analysis that you are describing. Drafting a report, whether it's going to be public or not, is not something that is being done at the moment. We are at the analysis stage.

[Yvon Godin, NDP, Acadie—Bathurst, NB]

You are in the process of drafting a report. So are you going to make it public?

[Tom Scrimger]

The matter of making the report public will be raised in the communication plan that will be submitted to the minister once the report has been completed.

The report isn't finished yet. The minister will decide what he wants to do when the report is ready and will establish his communication plan for the report.

[Yvon Godin, NDP, Acadie—Bathurst, NB]

So you aren't able to confirm whether the report will be made public. It will be the minister who decides that?