Canadian Taxpayers Federation
http://www.taxpayer.com/Facts/BilingualismCost.html


The Cost of Official Bilingualism

C.E. Dowswelll of Wetaskiwin Alberta, writes: "Would you please do a cost study of what bilingualism … [has] cost taxpayers to date?"

by Bruce Winchester

There are few government policies that can spark as much debate as official bilingualism. A so-called “gift to Canadians” from the late Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau — bilingualism is the gift that keeps on giving.

Beyond the direct costs to taxpayers, bilingualism also adds to the cost of doing business – almost every product sold in Canada must have labels in both English and French.

Without a doubt, providing bilingual services is expensive. Sure its nice to be able to speak more than one language, but is such a service necessary in every corner of the country?

Calculating the actual cost of bilingualism is a tall order. One of the most comprehensive approaches to this question can be found in Lanark-Carleton MP Scott Reid’s book Lament for a Notion.

Reid’s analysis, as is ours here, looks just at the bill for federal taxpayers. However, it’s worth noting that provincial and even local taxpayers also pay for bilingual services.

The following table adapts material presented in Scott Reid’s book (page 247). Using public documents and Access to Information data, Reid has generated a comprehensive estimate of federal spending on bilingualism. Reid’s calculations cover the fiscal years 1971 to 1991. In an effort to update these figures, spending on bilingualism as a percentage of total federal spending was used to estimate equivalent figures for the last two fiscal years.

Rising Costs of Official Bilingualism
Select years -- Source: Adapted from Lament for a Notion (1993) by Scott Reid
Year Bilingualism Cost
1971-1972 375.7 million
1974-1975 472.5 million
1979-1980 981.1 million
1984-1985 1.27 billion
1989-1990 1.44 billion
1990-1991 1.67 billion
1991-1992 1.74 billion
1999-2000 1.70 billion
2000-2001 1.79 billion

The bottom line is that since bilingualism began federal taxpayers have doled out approximately $37 billion.


What the Government Claims

Not surprisingly, the federal government provides different numbers – less than a quarter of what Reid found coming in at just under a half billion dollars in 2001.

What the Federal Government Claims
2000 2001
Staff Development 10.1 million 11.3 million
Translation Bureau 140.1 million 152.1 million
Canadian Heritage 282.4 million 274.6 million
Privy Council 11.5 million 12.6 million
Total $444.1 million $450.5 million
Source: Public Accounts Volume II Part 1, 2000-2001

Using federal government figures it is only possible to account for $450 million of spending on bilingualism. Staff training and translation costs account for $163 million while the remainder is identified as funds transferred in support of minority language promotion. This is a far cry from the comprehensive analysis that Reid produced which includes:

The costs of educating federal public servants;
The costs of bilingual services provided to the public;
The costs of providing bilingual media services to the public;
The costs of regulating the private sector’s use of official languages;
The costs of bilingual education programs; and
The costs of supporting official languages advocacy groups.
The federal government has a vested interest in showing the lowest possible costs in support of bilingualism. In Ottawa, the debate over bilingualism ended 30 years ago – Payez vos impots et parlez anglais! Or “Pay your taxes and speak French!”

http://www.pco-bcp.gc.ca/aia/default.asp?Language=E&Page=ActionPlan&doc=ActionPlan/chap5_e.htm

"The Treasury Board’s annual reports show that the participation rate for Francophones in the public service has risen, from 25% in 1978 to 31% in 2002, even in the management category (18% in 1978 and 28% in 2002).58 The participation rate of Francophones is higher than their proportion of the population (24.1%).

The proportion of French-speaking deputy ministers was 28% in 2001 and 32% in 2002. However, it is noteworthy that the number of deputy ministers is small, so that statistics can fluctuate with the departure or arrival of one or two Francophones. The proportion is virtually the same for associate deputy ministers. For assistant deputy ministers, the proportion has held steady at 26%. "

Language of work
"IMBALANCE CONTINUES TO FAVOUR ENGLISH AS LANGUAGE OF WORK.

A September 2002 study on attitudes toward the use of both official languages in the public service57 confirmed there is an imbalance in second-language use by Anglophones and Francophones. Generally, English remains the preferred language of work, to the detriment of French, except in Montreal."

75% of Canada speaks English...yet the government thinks you are a 2nd class citizen if you don't speak fluent french.

Interesting. Yeah, you never think of the costs associated with labeling everything in Ontario/Calgary/Vancouver in French.

What alternative do you propose though?

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Are you there?

Someone I know sent this to the official language commissioner...you should send something similar:

_______________________________

Everyone,



Today I lodged the following formal complaint with the Office of the

Commissioner of Official Languages. Their address is:



Office of the Commissioner of Official Languages

Head Office

344 Slater Street, 3rd Floor

Ottawa, Ontario

K1A 0T8



Suggest that as many as possible submit the same complaint.


Please accept this as a formal complaint under the Official Languages

Act.



This complaint pertains to the implementation of Part VI of the

Official Languages Act in the National Capital Region.



Legislative and Policy Framework



1. The Official Languages Act Part VI "Participation of

English-speaking and French-speaking Canadians" states in article 39

that the Government of Canada is committed to ensuring that

"(a) English-speaking Canadians and French-speaking Canadians,

without regard to their ethnic origin or first language learned, have

equal opportunities to obtain employment and advancement in federal

institutions; and

(b) the composition of the work-force of federal institutions tends

to reflect the presence of both the official language communities of

Canada, taking into account the characteristics of individual

institutions, including their mandates, the public they serve and

their location."



2. In support of the above part of the OLA the new Treasury Board

Secretariat Policy on Official Languages for Human Resources

Management (Effective April 1, 2004) includes the following

statement:



Taking into account their mandate, public, and the locations of their

offices, institutions ensure that:

. the method used to select employees is based on merit;

. English- and French-speaking Canadians have equal opportunities

for employment and advancement while respecting the merit principle;

. recruitment measures are in place to ensure equitable

participation by both official language communities;

. their workforce tends to reflect the presence in Canada of the two

official language communities. "



3. The Action Plan for Official Languages unveiled by the Prime

Minister and Mr Dion one year ago contained the following statement

when speaking of the Quebec anglophone under-representation problem in

that province.



The Act requires that Anglophones and Allophones (those who speak English as a second language) receive equal opportunities for

employment and advancement in all federal institutions — where the

workforce should reflect the presence of both official language

communities. This serious commitment is binding on all institutions.



Current Statistics re Representation in the National Capital Region



1. The Action Plan on Official Languages states:



"The Treasury Board's annual reports show that the participation rate

for Francophones in the public service has risen, from 25% in 1978 to

31% in 2002, even in the management category (18% in 1978 and 28% in

2002). The participation rate of Francophones is higher than their

proportion of the population (24.1%)". The preceding is based on

countrywide statistics from the 2001 Census using mother tongue

statistics to compute representation.



2. The statistics in the NCR, as presented in the Official Language

Report for 2002-03 from Treasury Board Secretariat, shows the

participation of Francophones in the NCR as follows:



Institutions where TBS is employer Anglophone 59% Francophone 41% The representation of Allophone visible minorities (whose first language is neither French nor English) in the public service is dismally low compared to their percentage in the general population.



3. The 2001 Census shows the Francophone minority population of Ottawa

Hull to be 361,340 – 34.4% of the 1,050,755 NCR total population

according to mother tongue.



4. The 2001 census shows that the francophone population represents

21.75% of the total Canadian population and 28.89% of the Ottawa/Hull

population if language spoken at home on a regular basis census

statistics are used.



My complaint therefore is that the current government has not upheld

its commitment for equitable participation in federal government

employment in the National Capital Region as stipulated in Part VI of

the Official Languages Act. If mother tongue is utilised as a

statistical base then francophones are over-represented in federal

government employment in the NCR by 16.9 percentage points Canada-wide

and 6.6 percentage points according to regional representation. If

language spoken at home statistics are utilised then francophones are

over-represented by 19.25 percentage points Canada-wide and 12.11

percentage points regionally.



I would like the Federal Government to develop and announce a plan to

all Canadians to correct this situation and to assure that

representation commitments guaranteed by the Official Languages Act

are upheld in the future.





Yours truly,

National Post : March 14, 2003

Poisonous fruits of bilingualism
Barry Cooper
CALGARY - On Wednesday in Ottawa the Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs, Stéphane Dion, stood next to a beaming Prime Minister and announced that some serious spending would make the country more bilingual. A 35% increase in his dedicated bilingualism budget generated some impressive numbers. To the $570-million currently being spent each year, was added another $750-million in new and reallocated money. Over the life of the program, that amounts to about $3.6-billion, roughly the same as new spending for the military.

The money goes to minority-language schools, including kindergartens; to upgrading second-language classes; and to provide bilingual services in hospitals and courts. Because every decision of the federal government will require a language-impact statement, there is an additional regulatory burden as well.

According to Dion it's worth it. Certainly there is no question of pushing French down the throats of English-speakers. "On the contrary, it's Canadians who are pushing us in the back. They want more opportunities to learn their country's two official languages." He told CBC how his heart soared listening to cute little Chinese-Canadian kids in Richmond, B.C., chattering away in French.

The Prime Minister saw greater significance in the new spending. "The fact that we have two official languages," he said, "that we have people coming from all over the world and have found a way to live in peace in different languages, colours, and religion, and build a country that is an example to the world, it is part of the Canadian personality that we have to continue to build." Before being carried too far aloft on the wings of prime ministerial rhetoric concerning our ability to live peacefully in different colours, we should recall at least a few pertinent facts.

In comedy and politics, timing is everything. It was no coincidence that the announcement came the same day Quebec Premier Bernard Landry, coasting on a comfortable lead in the polls and with no intention of making separatism an issue, called a provincial election. Dion has long believed that every province should be officially bilingual, following the splendid example set by New Brunswick. If they were, he has said, "a lot of French-speaking Quebecers would encourage their own government to be even more open to the language minority of Quebec than is the case today." So the new bilingualism "action plan" is to encourage Quebec.

Consider the consequences of the last big push by the federal government in the direction of bilingualism, which was also supposed to encourage Quebec. In 1963, when Jean Chrétien was still new to the House of Commons and official bilingualism was but a wild glitter in the eye of Pierre Trudeau, government "help" to language minorities was somehow seen as a way to fight terrorists in the FLQ as well as the more benign separatists and ordinary nationalists. A couple of years later the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism announced that the existing language policy was "the greatest crisis in Canadian history." Even more shocking, Canadians had no idea how bad the crisis was. By the end of the decade, Trudeau had passed the Official Languages Act; the constitutionalization of language rights arrived in 1982, bundled into the new Constitution.

Some astute analysts of the implications of the recommendations of the Bi-Bi Commission started calling it the Bye-Bye Commission. By drawing so much attention to Quebec and the language issue, the federal government had legitimized a limitless sense of grievance. Ottawa unawares had enhanced separatism. No matter how generous and understanding English-speaking Canada might be, these analysts said, it never could be enough. So: Bye-bye, Quebec. They were nearly right.

Remember what happened: In 1974, Bill 22 made French the sole official language in Quebec. It was followed by Bill 101; by acrimonious litigation; by the first use of Section 33, the "notwithstanding clause" of the Constitution; and by growing anglophone impatience. Terrorists firebombed a coffee shop in Montreal in the name of linguistic purity. Following the Canadian Grand Prix auto race, Jacques Villeneuve ran afoul of the law by naming his nightclub after his own nickname, "Newtown." The United Nations Human Rights Commission then got involved, objecting to the language police measuring the size of English and French letters on commercial signs. They thought Quebec had violated freedom of _expression, which the UN was sworn to uphold. Such were the first poisonous fruits of government action on the bilingualism front.

At a time when productive, bilingual Quebecers are leaving that province in response to genuine markets for their talents elsewhere, when Canadians are centilingual, not bilingual, this "action plan" looks like the worst sort of retro-liberalism and special pleading by the federal government for more government interference. The last thing the country needs is to revive the government-generated mischief that Canadians were glad to be rid of a decade ago.

Barry Cooper is a professor of political science at the University of Calgary.

Language in Quebec
Martin O'Malley and John Bowman | CBC News Online, June 2001


There have been raging debates in Quebec about the efficacy of the "language police" and whether fast-food outlets should be "Kentucky Fried Chicken" or "Poulet frit Kentucky." Coffee shops have been firebombed because of signs that said "Second Cup." Shopkeepers have been hauled into court because English words on outside signs were more than half the size of the French words.

The latest development comes from a commission on the status of French in Quebec, which concludes that the best way to protect the French language in Quebec is to make French the official language of citizenship in the province. Gerald Larose, chief of the Estates General on the Situation and the Future of the French Language in Quebec suggests a single agency replace the four organizations that currently operate as guardians of the French language in the province.

"An official citizenship has the immense advantage of eliminating all confusion in messages and to help all those who want to join us in forming a better idea of what Quebec is," Larose said.

Earlier in 2001, after a public forum on language in Quebec, Larose condemned the English media in Canada for what he called the "systematic demolition" of Quebec's language laws. Other speakers at the forum accused the English media of unfairly portraying Quebec's language laws as "xenophobic" and "fascist."

Then local hero Jacques Villeneuve arrives in Montreal in June for the Canadian Grand Prix. He calls a news conference to celebrate the opening of his new nightclub, which he has chosen to call "Newtown," the English translation of his surname and his nickname on the Formula One racing circuit.

This prompted a dozen formal complaints to the Office de la langue française, Quebec's language guardian. It also prompted Villeneuve, a Canadian who grew up mainly in Europe, to deliver a lecture to Quebecers angry about the name of his restaurant. "You have to see further than your nose," he told a news conference. "It's a big world. I grew up a lot of the time in Switzerland where people speak three or four languages and no one gets angry at each other."

After nearly 100 years of debate and language legislation – and despite the massive English presence around Quebec on the North American continent, the pervasive influence of English television and the burgeoning borderless use of the Internet – census figures show 81.9 per cent of Quebecers still speak French at home.

The first laws governing the use of French in Quebec were passed early in the 20th century. The first was the Lavergne Law, passed in 1910, which required that tickets for buses, trains and trams be printed in both French and English.

In 1937, Premier Maurice Duplessis passed a law requiring the French text of Quebec laws to prevail over the English, reasoning that the French would better reflect the intent of the law-makers. Anglophones in Quebec resented the law and it was repealed the following year.

In 1974, the Quebec Liberals passed Bill 22, which made French the province’s official language. It also restricted enrolment in English schools in Quebec. Three years later, the newly elected Parti Québécois, under the leadership of René Lévesque, introduced what it called the Charter of the French Language, or Bill 101 as it became known.

Within that bill was the declaration that French was to be the only language allowed on commercial signs in the province. With few exceptions, the use of English was banned.

Many retailers were upset by the new law. Morton Brownstein, owner of a Montreal shoe store, took his case all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada. In 1988, the court said that English could not be prohibited altogether, but that requiring the predominance of French on commercial signs was a reasonable limit on freedom of expression.

The public reaction in Quebec was swift and forceful. Confronted with the angry demonstrations of those defending Bill 101, then-Premier Robert Bourassa came up with a compromise. Invoking the "notwithstanding" clause to override the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Bourassa introduced Bill 178. It decreed that only French could be used on exterior signs while English would be allowed inside commercial establishments.

But in the provincial election of 1989, four members of the new English rights Equality Party were elected to the National Assembly. And in 1993, the United Nations Human Rights Committee ruled that Quebec's sign laws broke an international covenant on civil and political rights. “A State may choose one or more official languages,” the committee wrote, “but it may not exclude outside the spheres of public life, the freedom to express oneself in a certain language.”

Reacting to these events, Bourassa, in 1993, introduced Bill 86, which allowed English on outdoor commercial signs only if the French lettering was at least twice as large as the English.

Under the new law, Gwen Simpson and Wally Hoffman, owners of a small antique store near Montreal called "The Lyon and the Wallrus," faced a fine because the English and French on their sign were the same size. They contested the fine.

The Quebec court ruling in 1999 said the province can't continue to impose restrictions on the use of languages other than French on commercial signs unless it can prove the fragility of the French language in Quebec society. But the Quebec Superior Count overturned that decision in April 2000, citing Quebec’s unique geographical situation as an enclave of French speakers on an English-speaking continent.

The owners of "The Lyon and the Wallrus" (La lionne et le morse) are appealing the Superior Court decision.

The name of Jacques Villeneuve's new restaurant, "Newtown," is a registered trademark, like "Burger King," which means it is legal under the Quebec language laws. The same goes for "Second Cup," but this didn't stop three "Second Cup" outlets from being firebombed in the fall of 2000 by a fledgling terrorist group that calls itself the Brigade d'Autodéfense du Française (French Self-Defence Brigade.)

The Brigade claimed responsibility for the "Second Cup" attacks in Montreal's Plateau Mont Royal neighbourhood. Police suspect it is responsible for other firebombings, all in the name of what the Brigade has called "linguistic purity."

Larose of the Estates General on the Situation and the Future of the French Language in Quebec has warned that the survival of French in Quebec isn't guaranteed, no matter how many language laws have been passed.

"French is never a given. It is not irreversible," Larose said when his $2-million commission began hearings in November 2000. "There have been important advances in the last 25 years, but the context changes, and if we want to ensure that the progress made in those 25 years continues, we must adapt."