Official Languages Committee on Dec. 8th, 2020

[Raymond Théberge]

This is part of the action plan, so we are looking at the implementation of the action plan. We're working with various stakeholders in various provinces to see how the program is rolling out, whether it's having the impact we're hoping it will have on the official-language minority community, whether it's in Quebec or Manitoba or whatever the case may be.

I think it's a bit early to say whether or not it's working. However, we do have a lot of high expectations when it comes to the action plan, because it is one of the significant investments we are making in OLM communities. We are looking at that, and we will be talking to various stakeholders to see how it's rolling out.

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

My next question has to do with the asymmetry that exists in official languages. A report came out recently; a study was done on the asymmetry vis-à-vis the right to receive service in both official languages.

Mr. Théberge, first, can you comment on the enforcement of and compliance with language laws in the health care field around the country?

Second, is it safe to say the pandemic highlighted the asymmetries in service availability and in the various provincial laws and policies?

[Raymond Théberge]

That's an extremely broad question. I'll try not to step out of my lane.

The act, in its current form, provides for symmetry. In a number of provinces, however, asymmetrical arrangements happen on the ground.

Whether in health care or another field, transparency and accountability with respect to government investments are extremely important issues that ought to be studied.

[The Chair, Liberal, Emmanuel Dubourg]

Thank you very much, Mr. Théberge.

It is now over to Mr. Beaulieu for two and a half minutes.

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

I'm going to pick up where we left off earlier, the designation of bilingual positions.

What can we do to strengthen the language requirements for positions designated as bilingual, the idea being to improve things?

[Raymond Théberge]

We recently released a report on section 91 of the act, the section under which language requirements for positions are determined. Those requirements must be established objectively, but very often, that isn't the case.

We even provided the Treasury Board Secretariat with a tool that would help classify positions properly. Underestimating the language requirements of a position can result in the inability to provide services. It is therefore extremely important to adhere to section 91 and objectively assess language requirements.

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

The Official Languages Act is 52 years old. In your report, you sound the alarm. You say that French is treated as a language of translation and that there is often a perception that little progress has been made. French is in dramatic decline in the rest of Canada, but also in Quebec.

Isn't it time to question the blueprint for linguistic development behind the Official Languages Act? Obviously, the assimilation of francophones is continuing. It has even gotten significantly worse since the Official Languages Act was introduced, so much so that obtaining services in French in an emergency is very difficult.

[Raymond Théberge]

Part of the answer lies in asking where things would be if the Official Languages Act did not exist. I am a Franco-Manitoban, and I can assure you that the Official Languages Act has done a lot for our development. I don't want to think about what would have happened had we not had the act.

However, does the act, as it currently stands, provide the tools and mechanisms needed to support the continued development and vitality of our communities? That is a question that deserves serious consideration.

In the throne speech, the government mentioned the unique reality of French, so I think that consideration and reflection will inevitably happen.

[The Chair, Liberal, Emmanuel Dubourg]

Thank you, Mr. Théberge.

The last question goes to Ms. Ashton.

As you all know, we have another panel of witnesses, and we have to suspend momentarily for a sound test.

Ms. Ashton, you may go ahead for two and a half minutes.

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

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Commissioner, you said you were not consulted on the white paper. That shows the government developed the white paper behind closed doors, without consulting anyone, and that it is not taking the work seriously. You also said that modernizing the act was the key and that bringing in new regulations would not be enough. The committee discussed the modernization of the act. Witnesses at our last meeting told us that such a study should have been mandatory in order to put together a bill.

Do you agree that the next step should have been studying the modernization of the act, not developing a white paper behind closed doors?

[Raymond Théberge]

As I mentioned earlier, parliamentary committees and our office have already done that work. A lot of input has been collected and a lot of stakeholders have been consulted. We have all the tools we need to modernize the act. We are still pushing for a modernization of the act in 2021. It is urgently needed, but like everyone else, we are waiting to see what the government will lay out in terms of next steps.

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

Thank you, Commissioner.

You said it was urgently needed. Your report on what happened during the crisis shows that official languages can be a matter of life and death, if you will.

If the act isn't modernized before this session of Parliament ends, would you consider that a failure?

[Raymond Théberge]

On one hand, I'm disappointed that a genuine effort to modernize the act has not been undertaken, but on the other, I have no choice but to be optimistic. My hope is that we will see some progress and that the government will introduce a bill this session, one that addresses communities' needs and the new realities of our linguistic landscape.

[The Chair, Liberal, Emmanuel Dubourg]

Ms. Ashton, you have just 10 seconds remaining. I'm going to stop you there.

Mr. Théberge, we greatly appreciate your being with us today. We are always delighted to have you. I also want to thank the officials who joined you, Pierre Leduc, assistant commissioner of the policy and communications branch, Ghislaine Saikaley, assistant commissioner of the compliance assurance branch, and Pascale Giguère, general counsel in the legal affairs branch. It was a pleasure to have you all, and I hope we'll have an opportunity to see you again next year. Thank you everyone.

I will now suspend the meeting momentarily so the witnesses from the Office of the Commissioner of Official Languages can take their leave and the second panel of witnesses can join us.

The committee is meeting today to discuss the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the government's ability to deliver information in both official languages.

I would like to make a few comments for the benefit of the witnesses.

Before speaking, please wait until I recognize you by name. When you are ready to speak, you can click on the microphone icon to activate your mike.

As a reminder, all comments should be addressed through the chair.

Interpretation in this video conference will work very much like in a regular committee meeting. You have the choice, at the bottom of your screen, of either floor, English or French. When speaking, please speak slowly and clearly, and when you are not speaking, your mike should be on mute.

I would now like to extend a very warm welcome to our witnesses, who will start things off with opening remarks. They will each have seven and a half minutes, followed by rounds of questions.

I want to let you know that I use a card to signal that you have a minute left and a red card to signal that you are out of time. I have the difficult job of interrupting you when you are speaking.

Joining us, we have Linda Lauzon, executive director of the Association de la presse francophone, Fatiha Gatre Guemiri, executive director of the East Island Network for English Language Services, and Jennifer Johnson, executive director of the Community Health and Social Services Network. From the Public Service Commission, we have Patrick Borbey, president, and Susan Dubreuil, acting director general of the personnel psychology centre.

Ms. Lauzon, you have seven and a half minutes for your opening statement. You may take it away.

[The Clerk]

We can't hear you, Ms. Lauzon.

[The Chair, Liberal, Emmanuel Dubourg]

Ms. Lauzon, I'm going to give you a chance to get sorted out with the help of the technicians. We'll come back to your opening statement afterwards.

Madame Guemiri, the floor is yours.

Take it away.

[Fatiha Gatre Guemiri, Executive Director, East Island Network for English Language Services]

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen.

Mr. Chair, I'll only be using a minute and a half of my time. I want my colleague Ms. Johnson to have the other six minutes.

I will start with a bit of background on the East Island Network for English Language Services, or REISA. Our office is located in Montreal's east end. We are a network of community partners that works to increase access to English-language health and social services in the east and north of Montreal. I sent a map to the committee, but I don't know whether it was handed out to everyone. We cover nearly two-thirds of the island of Montreal. We serve an English-speaking population of nearly 164,000, in an area that stretches from Saint-Laurent up to Pointe-aux-Trembles and down to Hochelaga. I'm pleased to see members of the committee who represent four ridings in the area served by REISA.

Now I will turn to today's topic, information in English. The situation in Quebec is unique. We look for all the information on federal government sites. During the pandemic, we looked on MPs' Facebook pages because the information was posted in both official languages. They know we follow them, and that gives us some satisfaction.

I will now ask Ms. Johnson to take over; she will provide an overview regarding access to English-language information. She is here on behalf of the Community Health and Social Services Network, or CHSSN, which represents 26 networks across Quebec.

[Jennifer Johnson, Executive Director, Community Health and Social Services Network]

Thank you very much. It's a pleasure for me to be here today.

As Fatiha said, I represent the English-speaking provincial organization called the Community Health and Social Services Network. I'm going to give you a portrait with a lens on health and social services in the English-speaking community in Quebec, a community-based response to the COVID pandemic, the use of federal information and the importance of that information for the community.

As Fatiha mentioned, there is a network of organizations across the province. I gave a map to you prior to this meeting. I hope you had a chance to look at it. It gives you really interesting information about population size and proportion. We have over a million English speakers in Quebec and they're distributed all across the province. Each one is very different.

Health Canada has been supporting these networks since 2004 to improve their capacity to improve access to English-language health and social services. I can tell you that the work that we've been doing since 2014 was a critical element for these organizations to be prepared for a crisis situation, which we experienced with COVID-19. The community became a lifeline for the English-speaking populations in terms of finding and getting the information they needed.

I surveyed all 25 of our networks and 100% of them used information coming from the Government of Canada website. Of them, 56% of them used it on a regular basis, 44% used it occasionally and 89% said it was easy to find. The other ways that they found information from the Government of Canada was through partners who would refer them. Fatiha mentioned that members of Parliament themselves and their Facebook pages were critical resources.

These community organizations then used this information and distributed it to the English-speaking community through newsletters, Facebook pages, newspapers and websites. In some instances where they had very vulnerable populations, they actually hired professionals to help, for example, people on the Magdalen Islands who are English speakers, very unilingual English speakers, navigate the compensation information coming from the federal government. These organizations were a critical element in ensuring that the English-speaking community members got the information they needed that the government was providing.

I'll give you a quote. One of our networks based in the Outaouais surveyed its English-speaking community members about which resources they went to for information. Of those surveyed, 42% went to the Canada.ca website for information versus the 25% who went to Quebec.ca for information.

The federal government is still playing a really important role in making sure that the English-speaking community in Quebec gets the critical information it needs during a crisis.

As I imagine you've heard multiple times, the linguistic barrier becomes a really pivotal problem in a crisis situation. I think that the information that we were able to get from the federal government really complemented what the Quebec government was doing to ensure that the English-speaking community got information.

I think my time is close to wrapping up, so I'll stop there.

[The Chair, Liberal, Emmanuel Dubourg]

Thank you so much, Ms. Johnson.

I'm not sure whether Ms. Lauzon, of the Association de la presse francophone, is with us again.

Ms. Lauzon, are you ready to give your opening statement?

[Linda Lauzon, Director General, Association de la presse francophone]

Good afternoon. Yes, I'm ready.

[The Chair, Liberal, Emmanuel Dubourg]

Ms. Lauzon, you have seven and a half minutes.

[Linda Lauzon]

Mr. Chair, members of the committee, thank you for having us today.

I'm here before you this afternoon as the executive director of l'Association de la presse francophone but also as an authorized representative of the Official Language Community Media Consortium, which represents 105 community minority radios and newspapers. The consortium brings together members of l'Association de la presse francophone, which represents minority francophone community newspapers of Canada; l'Alliance des radios communautaires, which represents the minority francophone community radios of Canada; the Quebec Community Newspapers Association, which represents the minority anglophone community newspapers of Quebec; and the English Language Arts Network, which represents the minority anglophone community radios of Quebec.

Since the summer of 2016, we have pooled our expertise, our experience and the strengths of our respective networks. Now all four organizations work hand in hand and speak with one voice for our sector.

What is an official language minority community media organization? Since there are so many new committee members, I think it's important to explain what separates an official language minority community media organization from mass media and other media organizations. An official language minority community media organization is considered an essential service since it is often a community's only source of local news in its official language.

Its role as an essential service provider has been vital throughout the pandemic, reflecting the minority community and giving it a voice. Very often, minority communities are isolated, whether in rural or urban areas. An official language minority community media organization is a tool for community development and cohesion, while helping to build an official language minority community's sense of identity and contributing to its vitality. It also provides a space to share ideas and information. I want to reiterate, communities have used that space to the fullest extent during the pandemic. Finally, an official language minority community media organization is an indicator of an official language minority community's vitality, one that government authorities refer to often.

Now I will turn to the essential role official language minority community media organizations play: keeping the community informed throughout the pandemic. As you no doubt know, the federal government has made numerous cuts to what it spends on advertising in traditional media. We therefore applaud the government on the measures it recently announced, which are meant to be a step in the right direction.

The cuts hit official language minority community media doubly hard, given that the critical mass of potential advertisers for the vast majority of our radio stations and newspapers represents a tiny fraction of the advertising pool in other media.

As the Commissioner of Official Languages pointed out in his June 2018 decision, further to a complaint made by our organizations, the federal government did not see fit to assess the impact of its decisions on our media organizations before making the cuts. Since the commissioner's decision in 2018, Public Services and Procurement Canada has not made any changes to remedy the situation.

Although I could give you a list of examples, I will focus on the federal government's advertising campaign to raise awareness about the COVID-19 pandemic. The $30-million campaign was announced in April 2020. Our organizations received an average of $1,500 each for the purchase of federal advertising space; that amounts to 0.5% of the ad campaign budget. That's a hard pill to swallow.

We found out that the public broadcaster's share of the ad campaign spending to combat the spread of COVID-19 was several million dollars. Keep in mind that the public broadcaster already receives more than a billion dollars in government funding annually. That means the responsibility to inform and educate official language minority communities—something all of our community media do—fell on our shoulders. Public broadcasters in the regions did not step up and assume the role. They got the real money, and we got mere crumbs.

Beyond the ongoing unfairness in how federal advertising dollars are distributed, the pandemic has had a major impact on the already strained ability of community newspapers and radio stations to inform their target audiences.

It goes without saying that local news has played an instrumental role throughout the pandemic, and the demand is constantly growing, now more than ever. Indeed, since the spring, our website and social media traffic as well as our audience shares have gone up 35% to 55%, depending on the region.

People looked to their community media organizations. That is a clear testament to the relevance and value of the local news coverage provided by our media organizations during the pandemic.

Thanks to a number of assistance programs and stopgap emergency measures put in place by the government, our community media organizations—which, first and foremost, are organizations close to home, as you know—have continued to follow, relay and explain the considerable information put out daily by the federal government, as well as provincial, territorial and municipal governments.

I should mention that the emergency measures the federal government has introduced since the spring have helped to soften the impact of the crisis on our media organizations and their ability to inform official language minority communities. A number of media organizations in official language minority communities were able to access support through the measures and thus fulfill their roles as essential service providers. The measures helped. They made our outreach possible.

Like everyone, we face an uncertain future. How long the pandemic and the ensuing recovery period will last is even more uncertain. The emergency support measures are drawing to a close, but our media organizations want and need to continue providing this essential service to their communities. Without the resources, however, they can't, and the meagre $1,500 they received will not do it.

I want to address the local journalism initiative, which has been instrumental. Thanks to the program, we maintained a presence in communities and created high-quality civic journalism throughout the pandemic. However, 105 local media organizations have to share just $900,000 in funding a year. That's $8,500 per organization per year. The program has proven to be excellent, but the funding is not in line with the demand. It is essential that the government boost program funding in order to help us.

[The Chair, Liberal, Emmanuel Dubourg]

Thank you, Ms. Lauzon. We are coming to better understand the association's role.

We will now go to Patrick Borbey, from the Public Service Commission.

[Patrick Borbey, President, Public Service Commission]

Mr. Chair, thank you for inviting my colleague Susan Dubreuil and I to appear before the committee today.

I want to begin by acknowledging that we are on the unceded traditional territory of the Algonquin Anishinabe people.

I would like to share what my organization has done to quickly adapt and to ensure that our obligations under the Official Languages Act were respected during the pandemic. I will also discuss actions the Public Service Commission took to ensure that departments and agencies were able to staff bilingual positions, including those in response to the crisis. Finally, I will provide you with some data on public service staffing that I hope the committee will find useful for its study.

To respect our obligations under the Official Languages Act during the pandemic, the Public Service Commission, or PSC, quickly adapted to changing circumstances. The department took action, both internally with its employees, in accordance with part V of the act, as well as in communications and services with its clients and with the public, in accordance with part IV of the act.

Since last March, all communications with employees have continued to be in both official languages simultaneously. This includes frequent email messages from myself, COVID-19 updates and any other internal communications to employees. Over the past nine months, we held three virtual bilingual all-staff meetings. We have been finding innovative solutions to deliver these events with simultaneous interpretation.

In my role as leader of the organization, I raise official languages obligations with my executive management team on a regular basis, and I insist that employees have the right to write and speak in their preferred official language.

When dealing with the public, all communications with Canadians have continued to be in both official languages and have been released simultaneously in both French and English. This includes the content on our website and social media, answering public inquiries and providing information sessions to job seekers. Prior to and throughout the pandemic, I have ensured that when invited to participate in any event, I always deliver my remarks in both official languages.

In response to the pandemic, the PSC has partnered with Health Canada in establishing an inventory of volunteers to support provinces, territories and the Canadian Red Cross in their urgent health human resource needs. All materials were bilingual. Communications with Canadians were in the official language of their choice. The safety, security and well-being of our clients and employees is critical to our service delivery and in designing new staffing and assessment solutions, but never at the expense of the Official Languages Act.

As you know, there are several organizations with responsibilities regarding official languages within the federal public service. In accordance with the Public Service Employment Act, deputy heads are responsible for establishing official language proficiency as an essential qualification required for the work to be performed. They are also accountable for ensuring their employees meet the official language requirements of their positions.

The office of the chief human resources officer is responsible for policies related to languages in communications and services to the public, as well as official languages in the workplace. It is also responsible for establishing second official language qualification standards. The PSC's primary role is in the assessment of official languages, including the provision of second language evaluation tests.

For the assessment of proficiency in the second official language for bilingual positions, the PSC appointment policy requires that all departments and agencies in the core public administration use PSC tests. These evaluations are administered in PSC test centres across the country, as well as in selected departments and agencies.

In addition, our tests are widely used by separate employers, such as the Canada Revenue Agency and the Canadian Armed Forces. These tests ensure that merit is met with respect to staffing bilingual positions, so that Canadians can be served in the official language of their choice, and public servants can work in the official language of their choice.

On an annual basis, the PSC conducts and oversees more than 100,000 second language tests. Our databases hold over four million test results, the majority of which are second language test results.

There are close to 86,000 bilingual positions in the federal core public administration, not counting separate agencies. This represents 43% of all core public administration positions.

The pandemic has impacted government operations in many areas. In our case, it has affected the capacity to conduct in-person second-language evaluation testing.

The PSC promptly put in place two temporary policy measures and supporting guidance. They provide more flexibility to departments and agencies in assessing second-language requirements for appointments to bilingual positions. Both measures are meant to ensure that merit with regard to official languages and linguistic obligations provided by the Official Languages Act are respected. These measures allowed deputy heads to recruit the bilingual talent needed to support efforts related to COVID-19 or to ensure the effective functioning of the Government of Canada.

A pulse survey with organizations was conducted to obtain feedback on these temporary measures and to give us a sense of their use. The survey showed that 90% of respondents indicated that the two measures were useful to respond to their staffing needs.

Furthermore, the PSC implemented new virtual second-language interviews—

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

Mr. Chair, there's no interpretation.