Canada: Time to rethink raison d' être for bilingualism

[Harold Schiffman]

Time to rethink raison d'être for bilingualism If the government
believes it's important, it needs to do more to train public servants

Randall Denley
The Ottawa Citizen


Sunday, February 10, 2008


The pressure for a common-sense approach to bilingualism in this
country continues to build. The latest reality check comes from the
union that represents 55,000 government professionals and scientists.
The Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada (PIPSC)
pinned the government's ears back in front of a House of Commons
committee last week, arguing that the government has gone too far in
its bilingual hiring policy. Not only does that policy restrict access
to public-service jobs for unilingual Canadians, the need to learn two
new languages impairs the government's ability to hire visibility
minorities, the union says. The whole situation is made worse by the
failure to provide language training to employees. While strongly
endorsing the concept of bilingualism, PIPSC is making a plea for the
government to allow its employees to acquire this skill on the job, as
has traditionally been the case.

In the early 1990s, the government spent around $70 million a year on
language training. By 1999, this was down to $50 million. Now it's
down to a mere $12 million a year. The union says: "Cuts of the
magnitude make a mockery of the commitment to equal access enshrined
in the Official Languages Act." The union says that most of the
remaining language training goes to members of the executive group,
who have an average age of 50 and many of whom are near the ends of
their careers. Employees in the engineering, architecture and land
surveying group are trying to restore the right to language training
at the bargaining table. That might be effective, but what a comment
on the government's failure to deliver equal opportunity for both
language groups.

One of the keys to fairness is taking a more realistic approach to the
level of bilingualism that is actually required. The union raised this
point in its presentation, saying that the language requirements
should reflect the actual duties of the position. That seems
self-evident, but the federal public service is pushing for fluency in
jobs where surely adequacy would suffice. For bilingualism to work,
federal public servants need to be able to accommodate each other, as
so many already do every day. Maybe the boss's French, or English,
isn't as good as that of a native speaker, but if you can communicate
with him, what's the problem? You should read the PIPSC presentation
yourself. Its arguments are clear and compelling. You can find it
online at www.pipsc.ca. One of the key points the union makes is that
the federal government must provide language training, if it is to
demand bilingualism, because our school system isn't doing the job of
producing large numbers of bilingual Canadians.

There was a bit of good news on the education front last week with
Official Languages Commissioner Graham Fraser's support for a standard
French-language achievement test to be administered at the end of high
school. One can only hope that the commissioner makes a crusade out of
this because it has taken decades for this particular light bulb to
turn on. It's absurd to spend millions of dollars on second-language
training in schools, even reshape the instruction model to make it a
top priority, then never measure the outcome. The provinces are
studying the merits of such a test. What's to study? People have a
right to know whether our approaches to language training work. One
suspects that provinces fear the embarrassment a standardized test
would bring. Ottawa's public school board is typical in that it
doesn't track the ultimate progress of its immersion students. The
board can't even tell us how many bilingual certificates it awards to
graduates, although its own schools are handing them out.

The House of Commons committee that heard the union's pitch is
reviewing possible changes to the government's official languages
plan. Prime Minister Stephen Harper also has former New Brunswick
premier Bernard Lord touring the country prior to making additional
recommendations on the subject.

The public service part of the issue is pretty clear. If the
government believes that workplace bilingualism is achievable and
important, it needs to do far more to help Canadians acquire language
skills. What we don't need to do is return to the era when public
servants spent more than a year away from their jobs trying to learn a
second language to a level of proficiency that simply isn't required.
The key to restoring fairness in the public service is to adjust our
bilingualism expectations to what's achievable. Bilingualism has
become an ideology, not a skill, and it's just not working.

Contact Randall Denley at 613-596-3756 or by e-mail,
rdenley at thecitizen.canwest.com

http://www.canada.com/topics/news/story.html?id=e5827dd0-4fb7-4b36-9717-d398e2105508&k=47116

-- 
**************************************
N.b.: Listing on the lgpolicy-list is merely intended as a service to
its members
and implies neither approval, confirmation nor agreement by the owner
or sponsor of
the list as to the veracity of a message's contents. Members who
disagree with a
message are encouraged to post a rebuttal. (H. Schiffman, Moderator)
*******************************************