In the name of language rights, the federal government is trampling on the career prospects of thousands of public service employees. Why? Because they have the misfortune of not speaking advanced French.
Discriminatory though it may be, that’s the new direction at the Treasury Board of Canada, which will be requiring all new supervisors in bilingual regions (including Ottawa, where much of the public service is based) to speak official languages at a “superior” level in June 2025. Currently, supervisors in bilingual zones must speak their second official language at an “intermediate” level.
Effectively, it’s a lockdown on the career advancement of anglophones.
But that’s how it goes in Canada, where the Official Languages Act has been weaponized by the current federal government. Largely used as a shield in the past, largely to protect the country’s French-speaking language minority, the law is being wielded as a sword, justifying the retraction of opportunities from people who comprise the majority of the population.
It’s not fair, and that’s the point — like so many other “equity” measures taken by the Liberals.
For context, English speakers make up 76 per cent of the Canadian population, according to Statistics Canada. They’re also largely unilingual: outside Quebec, just over seven per cent of this group also speaks French. French speakers inside Quebec, in contrast, are roughly 40 per cent bilingual. The Treasury Board’s new rules therefore take a lot more opportunities away from English speakers around the country than they do French speakers.
Which, for this government, makes this kind of language favouritism an entirely legitimate, moral move. Monolingual Anglophones make up the majority of the population and receive their language from the historic hegemon of Canada: Britain. They’re privileged — even if they never grew up with generous exposure to French, even if they’re conducting themselves in an official language as they’re perfectly entitled to do under the Charter. Any rule that deprives this group from entering and ascending the state bureaucracy is a feature, not a bug; it’s systemic discrimination in the literal sense.
The Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat downplayed the discriminatory nature of the change in a statement to the Post on Wednesday.
“The new minimum requirement will ensure managers and supervisors are able to carry out complex tasks in both official languages, and to foster and maintain a workplace where employees feel truly comfortable using the official language of their choice,” wrote spokesperson Ada Bayli.
French speakers, in contrast, are granted an ever-expanding sphere of rights. In 2023, the government passed a law protecting the right to work and communicate in French in private, federally regulated businesses in Quebec and francophone regions. No mirrored set of protections was ever created for Anglos in the rest of Canada and English-speaking regions of Quebec, of course.
Worse, the same bill, Bill C-13, tampered with the composition of the Supreme Court of Canada by prohibiting the appointment of monolingual judges. Now, most highly competent judges and lawyers in the country aren’t eligible to join the bench because they don’t speak French at an elite level, leaving Canada with a second-rate pool of applicants. The most recent appointments, Justices Mary Moreau and Michelle O’Bonsawin, had a lot less competition than their predecessors, because they no longer had to compete with high-calibre, English-only minds.
The change was made to accommodate the “right” of Canadians to be heard in court in either language — a right that never existed until the Liberals dreamed it up, and a right that can never be engaged because the Supreme Court doesn’t hear from parties directly (it’s the lawyers who do all the talking). The work of interpreters and translators, which had for decades allowed the court to operate in both languages, was no longer enough.
Having conquered the courts, the bilingualism fundamentalists have even gone after the Governor General. They’ve failed to convince courts that Canadian heads of state must be capable in both English and French … but one wonders how long they can be staved off, considering that at least some members of our top court almost certainly owe their seats to the new bilingualism mandate.
If you’re one of the few Canadians who speaks both English and French at a high level, the Liberals’ aggressive take on language — and Conservatives’ simple-minded support for it — is probably a good deal. Many Laurentians, francophones and New Brunswickers are in this group. These receive express entry into the federal public service and a better shot at moving up in the federally regulated private sector.
If you’re anyone else, it’s a bad deal, and for so many reasons. For one, individuals of these groups can’t expect a long career in the federal public service. If they manage to find entry-level work, their growth will be hindered by a lack of French capability — or a lack of man-hours on their real job as they waste time on perfecting their second language. It’s unfair and it’s unnecessary — especially as translation software accelerates in capability.
For two, it puts the rest of Canada at a disadvantage. The cost of official bilingualism is already astronomically high. One 2012 Fraser Institute study pinned the total figure at $2.4 billion. This eats into an already strained budget. An absurd amount of public funds are shovelled at second-language training contractors — especially under the present government. A massive $26 million was spent on contracts that had something to do with “language training” in 2023, the biggest year on record for their kind. Most Canadians are on the losing side of this bargain because, despite footing the bill, their job prospects don’t improve.
The new round of private-sector bilingualism spurred by Bill C-13’s assent added an additional $240 million to the pile in its first year, with $20 million ongoing, according to the parliamentary budget officer. This truckload of money benefits only the French side of the equation.
The addition of more language requirements in the federal public service will only create more need for this kind of spending. Any additional training contracts granted to meet the new high bar for second-language skills will take workers off the line.
At very least, as far as the new career-limiting federal public service rules go, supervisors without high-level French abilities will be grandfathered in — but if they hope to advance into a new role, they’ll have to undergo extensive language training to meet the new requirements. The collective groan of these workers can be heard across the internet.
Canada was supposed to be a country that allowed speakers of either official language to get ahead. Now, we’re a country that only allows bilingual speakers to get ahead. If only we could get back to the old-fashioned Canadian understanding of equality.
National Post