Official Languages Committee on Oct. 27th, 2022

[Francis Drouin, Liberal, Glengarry—Prescott—Russell, ON]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Thanks to the witnesses for being here.

My first question is for Mr. Bastarache. It's an honour to have the opportunity to ask him a few questions.

The appointment of bilingual judges to the Supreme Court has been debated at length since 1988, when parliamentarians were already trying to determine whether they should give the legal community a chance to learn a second language. That argument was advanced at the time to avoid requiring Supreme Court judges to be bilingual.

Now we're discussing section 16 of the Official Languages Act. A few years ago, the debate was about whether Parliament had the authority to legislate on the composition and nature of the Supreme Court.

Do you think it's constitutionally correct to apply section 16 to the Supreme Court?

[Michel Bastarache]

Absolutely.

The Supreme Court was created by federal statute long after Canada was founded, and that statute is the one that establishes the criteria. The Constitution merely provides that there is a Supreme Court. That's obviously from the Constitution Act, 1982, not that of 1867.

Now, I want to emphasize that we must adopt the litigants' point of view, not that of the judges or judicial candidates, in determining what should be done. Do all the citizens of Canada who speak either of the two official languages have equal access to the Supreme Court if its judges can't understand them directly? The answer is no.

I sat on the Supreme Court for 11 and a half years, and, during that time, there were at least two judges who couldn't read the briefs or even judgments written in French before voting, because the judgments aren't translated until they've been approved by the judges. The Canadian Bar Association therefore proposed something that I thought was utterly unacceptable. It maintained that it was sufficient to have bilingual judges sitting only when the court was hearing cases in French. That's not equality either. It changes matters because there are tendencies within the Supreme Court. There are groups that vote one way or another in somewhat ideological fashion. All judges must therefore be qualified in order to sit in all cases.

[Francis Drouin, Liberal, Glengarry—Prescott—Russell, ON]

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, René Arseneault]

Thank you very much, Mr. Bastarache and Mr. Drouin.

Mr. Beaulieu, you have the floor for a minute and 30 seconds.

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

Mr. Bastarache, I must say, as a kind of preamble, that I found it somewhat insulting that you said, or suggested, that English was tolerated in Quebec, whereas the anglophone institutions there are overfunded by the Quebec government. The anglophone minority in Quebec can't be compared in any way with minorities outside Quebec.

In that connection, here's what the United Nations Human Rights Committee stated in a decision in 1993: "A group may constitute a majority in a province but still be a minority in a State and thus be entitled to the benefits of article 27 [of the covenant]. English speaking citizens of Canada cannot be considered a linguistic minority." The UN that said that.

The groups that challenge the Charter of the French language are funded under the Official Languages Act. Virtually all funding granted under the act is used exclusively to strengthen English, anglophone institutions, anglophone pressure groups and English-language instruction in francophone institutions.

[Michel Bastarache]

I never mentioned tolerance; I said it was an accommodation.

And it is one, simply because the Quebec act provides that there is only one official language and that it's the common language of the Quebec community or people. The premier of Quebec repeated that throughout the last election campaign. It isn't an insult; it's simply a fact. The same is true in the other provinces. Is it—

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

What about the UN decision?

[Michel Bastarache]

The UN decision has nothing to do with that.

[The Chair, Liberal, René Arseneault]

Thank you very much, Mr. Bastarache.

Ms. Ashton, you have the floor for a minute and a half.

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

Thank you.

I'd like to go to Mr. Giroux again and go back to the question I asked during the last round.

How do you explain how the new policy under Bill C‑13 wouldn't result in increased costs to attract francophone immigrants from Africa, for example?

[Yves Giroux]

That's a question that's unfortunately beyond the scope and perspective of the report. It depends more on the government's immigration policy, on which I unfortunately haven't recently published a report. Nor would I be the person most qualified to say whether the government should make additional efforts to attract francophone immigrants or make the necessary investments for that purpose.

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

I understand.

I want to emphasize that it's an investment that has to be made. An amount of $2.9 million is a negligible investment.

To ensure that a bill as important and historic as this one is implemented, we obviously have to make significant investments of more than $2.9 million to stop the decline of French and strengthen the measures that francophone communities across the country need.

I think that's all the time I had.

[The Chair, Liberal, René Arseneault]

You have 15 seconds left.

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

I want to thank the witnesses for the important points they've raised before our committee.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, René Arseneault]

Thank you, Ms. Ashton.

That completes the two rounds of questions.

Thanks to the witnesses.

As Ms. Ashton and all the members here have said, we are truly privileged to have you with us today.

Mr. Bastarache, Mr. Giroux and Ms. Michalyshyn, if you feel you have any more information that should be provided to us further to the questions that were put to you and the answers you may not have had a chance to give for lack of time, please send that information to our clerk, and she will forward it to all the members of the committee. Please feel free to do so.

Having said that, I will suspend to give the next panel of witnesses time to settle in.

We are suspended.

[The Chair, Liberal, René Arseneault]

We will resume.

I would like to outline a few rules for the new witnesses in this second hour.

Before speaking, please wait until I recognize you by name. If you are on the videoconference, please click on the microphone icon to unmute yourself. Please mute your mike when you are not speaking. That prevents interference.

For interpretation, those participating through Zoom have the choice, at the bottom of their screen, between three channels: floor, English or French.

Members attending in person in the room can use their headset after selecting the channel desired.

A reminder that all comments by members and witnesses should be addressed through the chair.

I will allow each witness five minutes, no more, for their presentation. Should you run short of time, you will be able to clarify your points during the period of questions.

Having said that, I want to welcome the witnesses.

We have with us Patrick Taillon, Professor and Associate Director of the Centre for Constitutional and Administrative Law Studies of the Faculty of Law at the Université Laval.

We also have two representatives from the Association canadienne-française de l'Alberta, or ACFA, Pierre Asselin, President, and Isabelle Laurin, Executive Director.

You will each have five minutes for your presentation.

To start off, I give the floor to Mr. Taillon for five minutes.

[Patrick Taillon, Professor and Associate Director of the Centre for Constitutional and Administrative Law Studies, Faculty of Law, Université Laval, As an Individual]

Mr. Chair, I want to thank the committee for inviting me to appear.

The federal government does much, indeed very much, to protect and promote French in its institutions. The thrust of my remarks today is not to criticize the extent of the efforts it has made. What I want to focus on is the importance of properly targeting those efforts. The federal government, in practice, has been a very poor partner and has practised very little cooperative federalism in linguistic matters.

In the Official Languages Act, the federal government has stubbornly focused on the two official minorities without taking into consideration the fragile nature of French in its majority position in Quebec, where its decline is becoming clearer and accelerating. Bill C‑13 is designed in part to correct that problem, but I'm quite concerned that the solutions being put forward here remain only partial.

Federalism, by definition, inevitably presupposes the coexistence of several language regimes and policies. To achieve a degree of harmony and consistency, there must be an obligation to cooperate in the greater public interest. In the case of Canada, even the Constitution, which is both the supreme law of the land and the common act of all federal and federated entities, provides for asymmetrical language regimes and obligations.

The case before us today is that of Quebec. As section 90Q.2 of the Constitution Act, 1867, now expressly provides, Quebec is the only province and territory in Canada and North America where French is the official and common language. Quebec is the only jurisdiction where French is still, even today, in the majority, despite its decline.

Like the federal government, Quebec obviously has constitutional obligations toward its historical anglophone minority. It is important to reassure that minority. Neither the Official Languages Act nor the Charter of the French language can alter the rights guaranteed to Quebec's anglophone minority under the Constitution.

That being said, the central issue is the compatibility of language regimes. We must learn to harmonize, combine and supplement each other's efforts in order to refrain from putting Quebec in a situation where it must choose between advocacy of its own interests and its necessary solidarity with minority francophones elsewhere in Canada. We no longer want a federal policy that antagonizes or divides certain communities by pitting them against each other. Bill C‑13 is an attempt to correct this situation, and that's a very good thing.

However, to ensure that this intention or will of legislators is asserted, I would like to take the few moments I have left to outline four solutions that are designed to make the act more harmonious and to combine all these efforts.

First, in addition to the preamble to the act, in which a significant intention is stated, the bill must also include an interpretive provision and criteria. In that provision and those criteria, and in the powers that are delegated to the executive to make regulations and take measures, it is important that the act reiterate the express recognition of the objective of substantive equality and thus of differentiated treatment based on situation. It must also reiterate the federal legislator's intent to halt the decline of French in Quebec and to contribute to—

[The Chair, Liberal, René Arseneault]

You have less than 30 seconds left, Mr. Taillon.

[Patrick Taillon]

Second, with regard to the integration and francization of immigrants, the federal government rightly requires, in another act, that a language knowledge test be administered to all new Canadians. By granting them a choice of language, it undermines Quebec's efforts and capacity to integrate newcomers. That obligation must be maintained but adapted to Quebec's specific situation.

I will take my five remaining seconds to add that the federal spending power should also—

[The Chair, Liberal, René Arseneault]

Mr. Taillon, you will have ample time during the period of questions to develop your four points.

I now give the floor to the ACFA representatives, Ms. Laurin and Mr. Asselin.

You have the floor for five minutes.

[Pierre Asselin, President, Association canadienne-française de l'Alberta]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Pierre Asselin, and I am the president of the Association canadienne-française de l'Alberta, or l'ACFA. I am accompanied here in Edmonton by our executive director, Isabelle Laurin.

Thank you sincerely for this invitation to appear before you today. The work your committee is doing is invaluable for the future of French in Alberta and elsewhere in the country. The modernization of the Official Languages Act is key to ensuring the act's success.

ACFA has defended the gains that Alberta's francophone community has made, promoted its rights and supported its vitality since 1926—our centenary is coming up. ACFA represents more than 260,000 French-speaking Albertans, a population that grew more than 50% from 1991 to 2021. Despite this major success in Alberta, due in large part to a thriving economy in recent years, we are concerned about the decline that data from the 2021 census clearly shows in the Canadian francophonie. This is why amendments must be made to the Official Languages Act without delay. There is a truly urgent need for action. I don't want the next generation to find itself sitting here having the same conversation.

As a member of the Fédération des communautés francophones et acadienne du Canada, the FCFA, ACFA supports the broad outlines of Bill C‑13 and reiterates its support for the improvement proposals our federation has made. In recent months, the FCFA and all its members have held numerous meetings with parliamentarians and have outlined the improvements they would like to see.

I would like to take advantage of my appearance here to review what we consider are two essential improvement proposals: first, the addition of language clauses and, second, the necessary clarification of francophone immigration policy.

First, with respect to language clauses, when the federal government proposes new funding for specific initiatives, there is no formal mechanism for ensuring that funding is also allocated to the francophone communities. Consider, for example, the recent November 2021 agreement on $10‑a‑day child care services. We need child care services for young francophones here as well, but we are subject to the goodwill of provincial governments, and we need to invest considerable human and financial resources to prepare the necessary submissions. We would therefore like to see an obligation added to the bill to include language clauses in federal transfers to the provinces and territories, along with the option that the federal government may consider dealing directly with francophone communities where a province or territory rejects such clauses. That's important for us in Alberta given our history. The option of dealing directly with francophone communities would take into account the fact that the federal statute may not be able to bind the provinces to these types of language clauses.

Second, we would like it clarified that the new francophone immigration policy shouldn't merely contribute to maintaining or increasing our demographic weight, but that it should also establish a specific objective of restoring francophones' demographic weight. By that, we mean restoring rather than maintaining. An ACFA study has revealed a need for restorative francophone immigration targets to address the demographic decline of the francophonie. The last attempts at doing so were made far too long ago.

Those two changes would make an enormous difference in the everyday lives of French-speaking Albertans by correcting the decline in the demographic weight of francophones and guaranteeing access to provincial services in French. These are essential factors in supporting the vitality of our communities and combating assimilation, which is the aim of everything we're doing today.

ACFA has been working on this issue for nearly six years. On December 8, 2016, during consultations for the Action Plan for Official Languages 2018‑2023, a plan that's about to expire, the Minister of Official Languages at the time, the Hon. Mélanie Joly, asked our president, Jean Johnson, what she could do to have a major impact. When he dared to propose modernizing the Official Languages Act, she personally invited him to share that idea with a full room of incredibly excited people. Since then, within ACFA alone, in addition to Jean Johnson, the message has been spread by the various presidents of our association: Albert Nolette, Marc Arnal, Sheila Risbud and now yours truly. I hope the task doesn't eventually fall to my children.

In the meantime, the House of Commons and the Senate have released many reports, all political parties have made commitments, a reform document has been published, and two bills have been introduced. And here we are once again discussing the modernization of the act and what francophone minority communities would like to see incorporated in new legislation. We've been discussing this issue and sharing our dreams, aspirations and needs for more than 2,000 days now. It's time to stop discussing the details. With all due respect, it's time for our elected representatives to act.

[The Chair, Liberal, René Arseneault]

Thank you very much, Mr. Asselin.

As I told Mr. Taillon, you'll be able to clarify your points in response to questions.

In the first round of questions, each party will have six minutes to interact with the witnesses. I am very strict about speaking time because that lets everyone ask the questions they have prepared. I apologize if that makes you feel rushed. The members of the committee are used to it.

The first questions will come from the first vice-chair of the committee.

Mr. Godin, you have the floor for six minutes.

[Joël Godin, Conservative, Portneuf—Jacques-Cartier, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thanks to the witnesses for taking part in this exercise this morning to help make us better and make Bill C‑13 a better bill.

Mr. Taillon, can you tell me, yes or no, whether Bill C‑13 would achieve the Conservative Party's three objectives, which are to stop the decline of French, to protect both official languages and to promote them, knowing that French is the more vulnerable language?

[Patrick Taillon]

We'll have to assess the impact of the act in a few years.

First of all, putting names on things and acknowledging that French, which is in a majority position in Quebec, is nevertheless in decline is a first step. The fact that the federal government is now part of the solution and not the problem, which previously wasn't clear in the act, is a new shift in the bill.

However, I'm troubled by an ambiguity here, which I brought up in the first of my four solutions. And that's the way the legislator seeks to confine the matter to a preamble. The preamble isn't really part of the act. It's as though Parliament wanted to leave some room for interpretation, for the courts. The judiciary would either confirm the importance that must be attached to this new shift or make the claim, since it's confined to the preamble, that it's not really the law.

That's why I propose in the first solution that the new shift in the preamble be clearly expressed in an interpretive provision. In addition, where there are delegations of authority, since the government is responsible for many matters, that authority should be exercised in accordance with certain criteria, one of which is the new shift that we're describing together.

[Joël Godin, Conservative, Portneuf—Jacques-Cartier, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Taillon.

My understanding is that the bill doesn't achieve the objectives very effectively.