Bilingualism makes sense

Montreal Gazette
Thursday, August 01, 2002

Éditorial - Official language policy is the squeaking hinge of Canada's duality. Almost 40 years after it was introduced, this policy still makes many Canadians uneasy, sparking resentments that too easily obscure a common-sense approach to the details of each specific issue. Three recent news developments have revived familiar disagreements over how the central government should promote linguistic duality.

Top federal civil servants are abuzz over a recent decree permitting reductions to performance bonuses for about 1,000 senior bureaucrats who do not, in fact, meet the bilingual requirements of their jobs.

This newspaper has long supported bureaucrats' bilingualism, and not only for the front-line officials who meet the public. The requirement that managers be able to speak with their employees of either language is reasonable on the face of it and valuable at another level: in practice, this policy has put pressure on upwardly mobile anglophone civil servants to learn French and has created a work environment more accommodating of French than was the case up until the 1960s. This continues to be in the country's best interests.

It should be pointed out that the top officials face cuts, of 30 per cent, to their performance bonuses, not their base pay, and that the bilingual designation of their jobs has not prevented unilingual anglophones and francophones from being promoted into them. A third of the 3,200 top officials, according to an Official Languages Commission audit, lack the required language skills. These are the people targeted by the proposed bonus cuts, and who can quibble? People who don't measure up linguistically shouldn't receive full bonuses.

In another contentious development, the government has rejected a parliamentary committee's call for tough fines on Air Canada for failing to serve customers consistently in both languages.

The government doesn't have quite the same moral authority over Air Canada that it did before the airline was privatized in 1988. But as the airline operates in a federally regulated industry, the government still has legal standing to set certain rules. The Chrétien cabinet says it doesn't want to hold Air Canada to more rigorous linguistic standards than, say, banks or telephone companies, which are also federally regulated. But it should. Air Canada is the only remaining domestic carrier of national scope, and "national airlines," such as they are, are national symbols. Air Canada's acquisition of a string of mostly unilingual English carriers over the years has diluted its bilingual labour pool, so the government is right not to rush in with punitive measures. But Air Canada should be held to its recent promise to do better within a year.

The third recent dispute concerns audio feeds on the C-PAC parliamentary channel. The Federal Court ruled recently that Parliament must make sure Canadians have access to translated broadcasts in both languages. The decision came as a result of a complaint from a New Brunswick anglophone whose region receives only the untranslated C-PAC floor feed.

The C-PAC issue isn't of earth-shattering proportions. But it's symbolically important: the court ruling is being appealed by House of Commons officials, including speaker Peter Milliken. They argue that "the inherent and constitutional privileges" of the House put it beyond the reach of any court order on the issue.

Maybe that's legally correct. But leadership starts at the top, and the implications of the speaker's claim are depressing.