Ottawa MPP’s private language bill wouldn’t make city hall more bilingual

Ottawa will have to have a bylaw on offering city services in English and French if a new bill proposed by Ottawa-Vanier MPP Nathalie Des Rosiers passes.

The city already has one, so that’s pretty much that.

The demand to make Ottawa officially bilingual is stronger among the city’s francophones than most Anglos realize: It comes up in every election in Ottawa-Vanier and Orléans, usually in all-candidates’ debates where questioners tend to be baffled that something so obviously proper hasn’t been done yet.

The idea surged this year as something the city or the province might do, or that the federal government might push for, to mark Canada’s 150th anniversary. Specifically, Des Rosiers’ bill responds to demands from the largely francophone group Bilingual Ottawa Bilingue to revise the City of Ottawa Act, the provincial law that’s effectively the city’s constitution, to more deeply entrench bilingualism. Though it doesn’t remotely give the group, which organized a city hall rally on Wednesday, what it’s asking for, which is “to make Ottawa officially bilingual with English and French having equal status, rights and privileges plus creating a formal mechanism to ensure proactive oversight and adherence to policy and the law.”

Instead, Des Rosiers’ bill contains just about the smallest quantum of action possible. Anything less and you couldn’t write a law around it.

“We’re very pleased to see that somebody at Queen’s Park has taken the initiative,” said Treva Cousineau, the group’s secretary. “We’re a bit disappointed that it hasn’t gone further — you know, we always want more.”

But, she said, it’s progress and that’s something. “It’s on the floor of Queen’s Park. It’s not everything we wanted. But it’s something that it’s now in the legislature, people are aware. They can make changes, they can make it better, opposition parties can ask for more.”

The City of Ottawa Act now says that Ottawa has to have a policy on providing bilingual services. Des Rosiers’ bill will change that to a requirement that the city have a bylaw on the subject, not just a policy.

Des Rosiers introduced the bill in the legislature in Toronto on Wednesday afternoon after a hasty news conference at Queen’s Park, where she was backed by the other Ottawa Liberal MPPs. It “aims to reinforce” bilingualism in the city government, apparently, a vague goal it easily achieves.

It doesn’t make the city government “officially bilingual” in the federal sense. It doesn’t even write the city’s current bilingualism rules into the City of Ottawa Act that serves as the municipal constitution, as city council requested way back in 2001 (the Progressive Conservative government at the time didn’t want to or couldn’t be bothered). It doesn’t say what those rules need to be.

As it happens, the city has a bylaw and Des Rosiers’ bill explicitly says that that bylaw qualifies, so the city has already done the thing the bill says it would have to do. The only meaningful change is that the city couldn’t repeal the bylaw and replace it with nothing, which council is in absolutely no danger of doing under Mayor Jim Watson. He’s fine with things as they are, he’s said repeatedly.

“Mayor Watson has not had the opportunity to discuss the private member’s bill with Nathalie Des Rosiers,” his spokesperson Livia Belcea said in an emailed statement Wednesday. “However, after consultation with our legal branch, Mayor Watson believes that the proposed private member’s bill will have no impact on our language bylaw and French-language policy as we already provide services in both French and English.”

The bylaw formally recognizes “the bilingual character” of Ottawa and says citizens have a right to communicate with the city government in English or French.

The more detailed policy spells out what that means for the city administration, including spelling out that employees can work in either language and that upper-level managers have to be bilingual (though that’s a requirement that’s frequently waived, most recently when city council hired a new urban-planning boss last February).

None of the policy, the bylaw or Des Rosiers’ new bill says that every city worker has to be bilingual, nor that everybody has a right to instant bilingual service in every interaction at all times. They’ve been left unclad in iron on purpose, to avoid a municipal version of lawsuits over Air Canada’s not having a fluently bilingual flight attendant on every plane or senators popping into restaurants in governmentowned buildings to make sure the menus are in French.

The city government promises to try in good faith to provide the services people actually need. It does not promise equal French and English-language collections at every library, or that every summer-camp counsellor will speak both languages, or that there’ll be automatic simultaneous translation at a rezoning consultation in Richmond. Sometimes people complain that service isn’t good enough, though only 23 times in all of 2016.

So Des Rosiers’ bill is barely even symbolic. It might not even have time to pass: The legislature breaks for the summer at the end of this week and, like all private members’ bills, its chance for a vote will be determined by lot when the MPPs return in the fall.