Evidence of meeting #122 for Official Languages in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was language.

A recording is available from Parliament.

On the agenda

MPs speaking

Also speaking

Michel Doucet  As an Individual
Mona Fortier  Ottawa—Vanier, Lib.
Emmanuella Lambropoulos  Saint-Laurent, Lib.
Geoffrey Chambers  President, Quebec Community Groups Network
Stephen Thompson  Director, Government Relations, Policy and Research, Quebec Community Groups Network
Jean Rioux  Saint-Jean, Lib.

9:35 a.m.

Conservative

Steven Blaney Conservative Bellechasse—Les Etchemins—Lévis, QC

I agree.

Since you mention our anglophone colleagues, I'm going to give the rest of my speaking time to Mr. Genuis.

9:35 a.m.

Conservative

Garnett Genuis Conservative Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB

Thank you, Mr. Blaney.

I want to make it clear to my colleague that I'm learning French, not out of ambition, but because I love and am interested in languages.

Mr. Doucet, I'm a member from Alberta. I get the feeling that many young Albertans would like to take French courses in high school, but they subsequently don't have a lot of opportunity to use that language and therefore may lose their ability to speak it. The same is true of bilingual public servants who don't often have the opportunity to speak French. French-language services are requested from time to time, but it's not very common.

Do you have any suggestions as to how public servants and other individuals who have taken French courses can practise the language? Actually, French isn't widely used in our society.

9:35 a.m.

As an Individual

Michel Doucet

I'd like to find an easy solution to that problem. I've often heard what you just said. I've had students who came out of immersion and told me the same thing, which is that they didn't have the opportunity to speak French after high school.

This is obviously a personal choice. Now it's possible to watch French-language television in all regions of the country. French radio stations are also available across Canada, and you can establish French conversation clubs as well.

I speak a little Spanish. My Spanish becomes much weaker when I don't have a chance to travel to Spanish-speaking countries. If I wanted to maintain it, I would read and listen to things in Spanish. It's a personal choice. If people want to maintain their knowledge of the language, it's up to them to use the means at their disposal.

In Canada, several aids can be used to do that, such as books, newspapers and French language radio and television stations. I regularly watch TV and read in English. That's what helps me maintain my knowledge of English, but it's a personal matter.

9:40 a.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Denis Paradis

Thank you.

Ms. Lambropoulos, you have the floor.

9:40 a.m.

Emmanuella Lambropoulos Saint-Laurent, Lib.

Thank you.

I'm the anglophone you mentioned who sits on this committee and comes from Quebec. Having the opportunity to be here and to see a large number of anglophones who come from across Canada, I can say that many anglophones living outside Quebec are very interested in learning French because it's not imposed on them.

However, anglophones in Quebec tend more to speak English among themselves and not to want to learn French because that's their way of protecting their own language in the province. We're talking about ways to promote French, and I'm thinking of positive measures that wouldn't necessarily force them to speak French, but that, as Mr. Genuis said, would afford them more opportunities to do so once their high school course is over. Last week, some observers from Toronto told me they envied the fact that we speak French so well because we come from Quebec. They told me they really wanted to learn French. You don't hear that from anglophone students in Quebec, for the reasons I just mentioned.

You said the government could do a follow-up to the federal-provincial agreements. I'd like to know how you specifically recommend that we do that. How could we exercise this right of review with respect to those agreements and what they've achieved?

9:40 a.m.

As an Individual

Michel Doucet

For example, several agreements under OLEP already contain a provision requiring the province to report to the federal government on how the funding is used. In most cases, unfortunately, it's is not enforced. Consequently, I think we should ensure that this follow-up is done. If it's in the act, we should ensure it's done.

I don't know whether I have time to add something briefly in connection with your first comment. New Brunswick is the only officially bilingual province in Canada, and 75% of francophones there are bilingual. The problem is on the English side. Less than 17% of anglophones are bilingual. That figure is even lower than the national average. I'm profoundly saddened and disappointed by the fact that the only officially bilingual province in the country projects this kind of image of bilingualism.

9:40 a.m.

Saint-Laurent, Lib.

Emmanuella Lambropoulos

Thank you. I agree with you; I think the entire country should try to become bilingual. We're fortunate to be able to do so.

I want to go back to my question.

9:40 a.m.

As an Individual

Michel Doucet

Yes, pardon me.

9:40 a.m.

Saint-Laurent, Lib.

Emmanuella Lambropoulos

We're going to modernize the act; that's for sure. You mentioned a follow-up, but I'd like to know who would do it and how.

9:40 a.m.

As an Individual

Michel Doucet

It would be the minister responsible who signs the agreements with the provinces. Whether it be OLEP, manpower training agreements or health agreements, the officials responsible establish those agreements. Consequently, it would be up to them to ensure the obligations are met.

I often get the impression that all other obligations are considered important but that no one focuses on official language obligations. No one is asked to report on the way objectives are achieved. As I said earlier, provisions are included automatically, but not because anyone wants to ensure that the province or the other parties meet those obligations. I've seen that in several areas.

9:45 a.m.

Saint-Laurent, Lib.

9:45 a.m.

Liberal

René Arseneault Liberal Madawaska—Restigouche, NB

Do I have any speaking time left?

9:45 a.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Denis Paradis

You have one minute remaining.

9:45 a.m.

Liberal

René Arseneault Liberal Madawaska—Restigouche, NB

Mr. Doucet, we're talking about the federal government's obligation to implement positive measures, but the division of power, federal and provincial jurisdictions, is always there. The provinces are easily scandalized when it comes to that.

A subsection in part VII concerns positive measures to implement the federal government's commitment to official languages. Let's say a federal department, any one of them, wishes to transfer funding to a province, for schools that a francophone minority in that province is requesting, for example.

If the province doesn't meet that need, the department could decide to withhold a portion of the funding it allocates to ensure that those positive measures are implemented. Would that be a constitutional means of defence in resolving this jurisdictional war?

9:45 a.m.

As an Individual

Michel Doucet

I appeared before the parliamentary committee when part VII was amended in 2005, and I was troubled by an addition that had been made to that part respecting compliance with provincial jurisdictions.

Education is a provincial jurisdiction. As a result of its spending power and in the context of these agreements, it would probably be difficult for the federal government to dictate to the provinces how to use the money it gives them.

However, it could very well ask the provinces to be accountable, to explain how they have spent the money and to involve the communities. I knew at the time that this provision would come back to haunt us at some point, and I told the committee so. That's what's happening now. The provinces are saying that the federal government can do certain things, but always in compliance with their jurisdictions. I understand that because we have a federal system.

The federal government would not be able to interfere in postsecondary education or education in general, but it could ask the provinces to report on the way they use their funding.

9:45 a.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Denis Paradis

Thank you very much, Mr. Arseneault.

Mr. Doucet, thank you very much for your presentation and your answers to questions from members of the committee. Thank you, indeed.

Now we will suspend for a few minutes.

9:55 a.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Denis Paradis

Pursuant to Standing Order 108(3), we are studying the modernization of the Official Languages Act.

It's our pleasure this morning to have with us the Quebec Community Groups Network, with Geoffrey Chambers, president, and Stephen Thompson, director of policy, research and public affairs. Welcome.

As usual, you'll have about 10 minutes to make your introduction, and after that we'll go to the members of the committee for questions and comments.

We're listening to you.

9:55 a.m.

Geoffrey Chambers President, Quebec Community Groups Network

Merci, and good morning, Messieurs Paradis, Clarke and Choquette and members of the committee. I'm Geoffrey Chambers, the president of the Quebec Community Groups Network, a not-for-profit linking 58 English-language community organizations across Quebec. We serve Quebec's English linguistic minority communities, which are referred to collectively as the English-speaking community of Quebec. Joining me at the table is Stephen Thompson, our director of government relations, policy and research.

I have a few points before we begin.

I'd like to restate our condemnation of the decision of the Government of Ontario to abolish the Office of the French Language Services Commissioner and cancel plans to create a new French-language university. English-speaking Quebeckers stand firmly behind Franco-Ontarians and indeed all French-speaking Canadians living in linguistic minority communities. We understand and support their struggle. We are in this together with them, and they can count on our ongoing support.

We would also like to acknowledge the leadership of Senators Tardif and Cormier, and your honourable colleagues on the Senate Standing Committee on Official Languages in inspiring the Government of Canada's review of the official languages regulations and the ongoing national discussion, for which we are here today, on modernizing the Official Languages Act.

Finally, we take this opportunity to unequivocally offer our support and register our agreement with the principles and concepts advanced by the Fédération des communautés francophones et acadienne du Canada in their brief to this committee. There's no daylight between our mutual objectives of improving how the Official Languages Act works and advancing the linguistic rights of all Canadians.

There can be no doubt that the act must be modernized and that this work must be completed and accomplished quickly. The Federal Court's decision in FFCB v. Canada and the Commissioner of Official Languages' paralysis to pursue part-VII-related complaints are real and they're happening now. Last year's Borbey-Mendelsohn report on linguistic duality in the federal public service workplace highlighted continuing challenges for English and French Canadians to realize their rights under parts IV and V of the act. Many federal institutions are failing to meet their obligations under part VI of the act when it comes to employing members of our community in their workforce in Quebec.

The Official Languages Act is a lifeline for English-speaking Quebeckers. The act is the only language-rights legislation that protects the interests of English-speaking Quebeckers as a community. The act sets out quasi-constitutional rights for English-speaking Quebeckers, including the right to access federal services in English, the representation of English speakers in the federal public service, and those workers' rights to work in English. Further, the act provides the framework for much needed financial support for the community's institutions and networks.

I'm going to pass the next section over to Stephen.

9:55 a.m.

Stephen Thompson Director, Government Relations, Policy and Research, Quebec Community Groups Network

Good morning.

It was a pleasure for me to be here this morning to hear Michel Doucet's testimony. We are both members of Statistics Canada's advisory committee on language statistics, which met yesterday.

When considering the modernization of the act, our thinking was guided by the following principles, which must be woven into the fabric of new legislation.

First is the equality of status of English and French. There can be no separate status; nor can the law be written to differentiate approaches to either language. Flexibility to meet the unique needs of individual official language minority communities and achieve substantive equality can be achieved through effective consultation.

Second, a new act should provide for robust, mandatory and properly resourced consultation at all levels, including a formal mechanism for consultation at the national level. This is a major concern of English-speaking Quebec, which is not equipped to equally participate in national-level official languages discussions; nor is its presence adequately felt or seen here despite the size of our community.

Specific recommendations are contained in our written brief. I will, however, highlight the following.

Parts IV, V, VI and VII of the act are intimately connected yet implemented separately without coherent accountability. How can an institution fulfill its part IV obligations if it does not employ sufficient numbers of minority-language Canadians or allow federal civil servants the right to learn and work in their minority language? How are the official language minority's institutions and organizations visible to federal institutions, which are committed to taking positive measures to enhance vitality, if they exclude minority-language Canadians from their regional workforces? A siloed approach to implementing parts IV through VII of the act does not work.

We also draw the committee's attention to the chronic underemployment of English-speaking Canadians in the federal civil service in Quebec outside of the national capital region. From this perspective, several federal institutions are not meeting their obligations under this section of the act, which is vague and lacks regulation to make it enforceable.

Clarity and accountability must be brought to part VII of the act, and the Minister of Official Languages must by provided the authority to implement its commitments. We also insist on strict transparency provisions on federal investments made under part VII from all recipients, including provincial and territorial governments. Clear definitions of “positive measures”, “enhancing the vitality of”, and “supporting the development of” official language minority communities must be included. Responsibility without authority, like “in consultation with”, must be expunged.

We also call for a more focused role for the Commissioner of Official Languages, and the establishment of an administrative tribunal with the power to sanction transgressions of the act.

10 a.m.

President, Quebec Community Groups Network

Geoffrey Chambers

The QCGN's objectives in this discussion are not only to offer suggestions on how to make the act work more efficiently and effectively but to seize this opportunity to strengthen the language rights of Canadians. As I said in my opening statement, we firmly believe that Canada's English and French linguistic minority communities are in this together, and in that spirit we outline the following three goals:

With regard to part V, on language of work, this section of the act starts out well:

English and French are the languages of work in all federal institutions, and officers and employees of all federal institutions have the right to use either official language.

but it then goes on to severely limit these rights, based on geography. Technology has made geography, in terms of work, largely obsolete. Moreover, locating national institutional headquarters outside of the national capital region often results in the absurd situation of imposing on offices obligations for bilingual services to the public, due to the nature of their service, without the workers in those offices having the right to work in their official language.

In terms of employee relations, every federal civil servant must have the right to use the official language of his or her choice, and the right to learn his or her second language.

Part III of the act already provides a number of obligations for federal courts and tribunals regarding the administration of justice. These obligations should remain, and should be enhanced in an important way. Judges of the Supreme Court should be able to understand the official languages chosen by the parties, without the assistance of an interpreter.

Further, the act should create a federal obligation under part VII to encourage and assist provincial governments to ensure that access to the entire justice system is available in both official languages. A bilingual judge is of little use if the clerk cannot work in the minority language, and other court functions are not available.

Parts IV, V and VI of the act should be applicable to all federally regulated private enterprises. The only private businesses in Quebec that are not subject to the Charte de la langue française are federally regulated businesses and undertakings such as chartered banks, telecommunications companies and transportation companies.

Proposals to extend the application of the the Charte de la langue française to these entities would not only be constitutionally incoherent but would have the effect of territorializing constitutional language rights, which would pose an unacceptable threat to French and English linguistic minority communities across the country.

Extending the Official Languages Act, on the other hand, to federally regulated businesses and undertakings would not only fix a mischief in the law that exists in Quebec, it would ensure that these businesses experience the economic benefits of working in Canada's two languages across the country, and create language rights under the act for thousands of workers within federally regulated businesses across the country.

It would also provide a right to work and a right to service in the minority language from federally regulated businesses in every province. Therefore, it would be a win for both French and English minorities, and for the French and English majority populations across the country.

Thank you very much, and we look forward to your questions.

10:05 a.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Denis Paradis

Thank you, Mr. Chambers.

We will begin our round with Mr. Blaney.

10:05 a.m.

Conservative

Steven Blaney Conservative Bellechasse—Les Etchemins—Lévis, QC

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Chambers. I wanted to congratulate you for supporting the Franco-Ontarian community. It's very interesting to see our minorities join forces in dealing with situations that concern them.

That leads me to my question. As I told you at our first meeting, I'm from Sherbrooke, a city where anglophones and francophones live together harmoniously. Recently, when the Prime Minister went to Sherbrooke on a consultation tour, he was asked a question in English and answered it in French on the ground that he was in Quebec. A few days earlier, he had been in Ontario, where he was asked a question in French, which he answered in English because, I imagine, he was in Ontario.

Have you managed to counter this perception of linguistic compartmentalization? If not, what can we do? There has been a lot of talk about political management to enable anglophones and francophones to speak their own language wherever they are in the country or in Quebec.

10:05 a.m.

President, Quebec Community Groups Network

Geoffrey Chambers

As you know, we raised an objection at the time. We were somewhat disappointed because the citizens who appeared in Sherbrooke to ask questions had intended to address topics that should have been discussed in English.

The matter that was placed in front of the Prime Minister, I think, was an error. I think the response of the government subsequent to those events—because they weren't entirely isolated—has been pretty positive.

We have a dialogue about these matters and we try to discuss what the correct, polite and accommodating gesture is with regard to language in different circumstances. We don't always get it right, but we have to move towards trying to get it right as much as possible.

I do think the events you referred to illustrated a problem that is slowly but, I think, surely resolving itself.

10:05 a.m.

Conservative

Steven Blaney Conservative Bellechasse—Les Etchemins—Lévis, QC

With respect to the issue regarding the English-speaking Quebecker, the population is aging. There are needs with respect to health and being served in your mother tongue—if I can put it that way. In your view, since you are one of the best persons to address this, what is the biggest challenge today for the English-speaking community in Quebec?

10:05 a.m.

President, Quebec Community Groups Network

Geoffrey Chambers

There are a number of umbrella problems, but I think you have referred to what we would probably regard as the most pressing question, which is that the right of English-speaking Quebeckers to receive health services in their language is limited to the specific obligations codified in something called an “access plan”. You can't, as an English-speaking Quebecker, walk into A health institution and say, “I want this thing in English”—unless, when the institution looks it up, it finds out that it's obliged to do it, that it's written down that you have to get that in English.

Those plans are, for the most part, eight years old, out of date, and do not correspond to the institutional structure that was changed four years ago under Quebec's Bill 10. We're working very hard with the provincial government to put in place a new set of plans. Until they're in place, that right—which, in our view, should be an absolute right but which is, in fact, a limited right of access only when there is a defined service and which should be sorted out—would be our number one priority.

Of course, there are many other issues. There's some possible threat to our educational institutions under the educational reform that's being discussed. That could be quite worrying, but it hasn't happened yet. There are marginalized communities around the province that have a very difficult time getting any kind of service, because they're in small numbers in distributed areas.

So there are other things to discuss.

However, I think you were mentioning health and social services as being at the top of our agenda, and that would be pretty accurate.