Since her appointment in 2021, Governor-General Mary Simon has taken 324 hours of private French lessons.Justin Tang/The Canadian Press
When King Charles III opened Canada’s Parliament in May, the head of state delivered the Speech from the Throne in equal parts in French and English, at ease in both of this country’s official languages. Unfortunately, that is still not something the King’s official representative can do, despite receiving hundreds of hours of language training since 2021.
Former prime minister Justin Trudeau’s appointment of Mary Simon as Canada’s first Inuk Governor-General was rightly celebrated as an important step in the country’s journey toward reconciliation with its Indigenous peoples. Most francophone Canadians were willing to give her the benefit of the doubt as she undertook learning French as a third language after her native Inuktitut and English. Their patience has been severely tested.
More than four years and 324 hours of private lessons later, Ms. Simon has made little observable progress in French, further undermining Quebeckers’ support for an institution – the monarchy – in a province where it was already very unpopular. Canadian taxpayers have forked out more than $52,000 and counting on French tutorials for Ms. Simon. With less than a year left in her five-year mandate, it is worth asking whether the money has been well spent.
At least Ms. Simon did not have the gall to bill taxpayers $22,000 for two summer trips to Vancouver for language training. That, we learned this week, is what Quebec Senator Amina Gerba did, bringing along her husband on all-expenses-paid trips to the West Coast in 2023 and 2024. While there, the Gerbas received 40 hours of English lessons over 10 days. The couple travelled in business class and racked up expenses of more than $2,000 a day.
The annals of official-language training are filled with stories such as these since the adoption of the Official Languages Act by Pierre Trudeau’s government sought to raise the standards for bilingualism in federal institutions. The lofty goal then was to ensure that a federal Parliament and public service that operated mainly in English provided “equality of status” for French. Bilingualism became a requirement – in practice, if not in law – for upper-level positions in government, creating a huge incentive for language training, and countless opportunities for public servants, MPs and senators to disappear for weeks on end for all-expenses-paid immersions in one or the other solitude to “learn” French or English.
How much learning actually goes on under the auspices of “language training” remains a mystery. Prior to 2012, most language training was done through the Canada School of Public Service. Since then, individual departments are responsible for managing language training, usually contracting out the job to private language schools.
The Treasury Board Secretariat does not keep track of how much departments spend on this endeavour or whether the money is well spent. Thousands of public servants go through language training with poor results, scraping through on bare-minimum language tests only to return to work and forget what little they learned.
For all the bellyaching in parts of Canada about official bilingualism being a sop to Quebec, the truth is that English remains by far the dominant language of work in the public service. According to the 2024 Public Service Employee Survey, only 44 per cent of the 186,000 public servants who participated in the study said they held positions in which bilingualism was a requirement for the job. Fully 41 per cent said their positions required only English-language skills, while just 3 per cent said their job required only French skills.
The inability of francophone public servants to work in their mother tongue has long been a source of grievance, as anglophone supervisors with no or shaky abilities in French force francophone employees working under them to adapt accordingly.
Justin Trudeau’s government sought to address this grievance by amending the Official Languages Act in 2023 to raise the bilingual requirements for supervisors in the National Capital region, and parts of Ontario, Quebec and New Brunswick. Instead of attaining an “intermediate” level of French in reading and oral comprehension, supervisors must now be “proficient” in both official languages in those two areas.
The requirements apply to new appointments; existing supervisors who do not meet the new standards were grandfathered in. Even so, about a quarter of public servants who responded to the PSS in 2024 said that a lack of access to language training had affected their career advancement to some extent. Slightly more than half said it had not.
Still, the new requirements will only increase demand for language training for public servants, to the delight of private language schools, not to mention the Canadian tourism industry. After more than five decades, there has got to be a better way to attain the “substantive equality” of French and English in federal institutions that the Official Language Act seeks to achieve.