If you could please go to page 2 in our presentation, you will see a visual representation of all the constitutional texts and the legislation that govern the whole area of official languages.
We often refer to this as our house, notre maison. You can see there what my colleagues from Canadian Heritage have already described in situating Part VII in this whole. But, more specifically. you can see parts IV, V, VI and VIII that determine the legislative framework governing the matter that I am going to deal with today. This is the accountability framework that lies within the responsibility of the President of the Treasury Board and his department, the Treasury Board Secretariat.
The responsibilities of the Treasury Board are set out more specifically on page 3.
The Official Languages Act requires the President of the Treasury Board to submit an annual report to Parliament on the status of official languages programs in federal institutions on matters that pertain to the Treasury Board's legislative mandate. The report is based on information that federal institutions have provided to us about their accountability.
The policy on official languages, 2012, governs the reporting requirements for federal departments and institutions.
The Treasury Board's policy on official languages operationalizes the legal obligation. The requirements for monitoring and reporting mentioned in the policy on official languages make institutions responsible for keeping their information systems up to date and for monitoring their own compliance. The evaluation of the implementation of the policy and the associated policy instruments is based on reviews provided by institutions.
This policy framework therefore supports what my colleagues were referring to, that is, the accountability of the federal institutions themselves. The deputy heads are responsible for evaluating and overseeing the policy requirements within their own organizations.
In terms of accountability, you can see on page 5 that we have been reporting on the implementation of parts IV, V and VI of the act for a number of years. We have actually been doing so since the 1988-1989 financial year, when the President of the Treasury Board's first report was tabled. In March 2016, the President of the Treasury Board submitted the 27th report on official languages, for 2014-2015.
Every year, the Treasury Board Secretariat seeks out a subset of institutions subject to the Official Languages Act so that they can report back on official languages. This takes the form of a questionnaire with multiple-choice and open questions. In the report, the questions are grouped together in five categories: communications with and service to the public, the language of work, human resources management, governance, and finally, the monitoring of official languages programs.
All institutions subject to the act have to submit this data at least once in a three-year cycle. The number of questions has been reduced for small institutions in order to lighten their task of accountability.
The Auditor General of Canada has recognized the viability of this approach and of the collaboration between the Treasury Board Secretariat and the Department of Canadian Heritage, in an audit entitled “Required Reporting by Federal Organizations”.
I'll go to page 6.
Here you have a visual representation. The objective today is not to go into the details of the most recent annual report for 2014-2015, but to provide the committee with the type of information we gather. It must be noted that the institutions that submitted information were instructed to send a copy directly to the Commissioner of Official Languages and to the clerks of the two parliamentary committees on official languages, this committee and the Senate committee.
So you have already seen the graphics, like the ones presented here, in the annual report for 2014-2015, submitted by the President of the Treasury Board. Requiring federal institutions to send copies of their information to the parliamentary committees and the commissioner helps with transparency and with the accountability of the deputy heads in terms of the performance of their organizations.
We now move to page 7.
The report contains a number of statistical data tables. Data is extracted from various systems for the core public administration from the positions and classification information system, and for institutions outside of the core public administration, data is extracted from the official languages information system. These are publicly available databases. This data is presented in a series of tables that include a number of bilingual positions, level of second language proficiency, and compliance with other language requirements. Data is drawn from all federal institutions and presented every year, and this allows for year over year and statistical trend analysis on key indicators going back several years, to 1978, in fact.
We now go to page 8.
Data is also presented in a series of tables that indicate the representation of francophones and anglophones over time. Information is broken down by location, by occupational category, and according to the official languages responsibilities associated with bilingual positions.
Finally, on page 9, the annual report also lists and reports on the distribution of federal government offices, those required to provide services in both official languages, those required to provide services in French and those required to provide services and communications in English. The number of offices and points of service was taken from the public database called Burolis at the end of the financial year.
Institutions that are subject to the Official Languages Act update Burolis themselves. So the annual report provides the President of the Treasury Board with the opportunity to account for how the Official Languages Act is applied by federal institutions.
That concludes the presentation on the various methods and sources of accountability as parts IV, V and VI of the Official Languages Act are implemented.
Thank you, Mr. Chair.