Bilingualism is essential for officers of Parliament

It should stand to reason that in an officially bilingual Canada, this country’s officers of Parliament should be bilingual.

It is quite rare for private members’ bills from the opposition side of the House of Commons to make it through the parliamentary process and into law, but legislation to that effect introduced last spring by Alexandrine Latendresse, the New Democratic Party MP for the Quebec riding of Louis-St-Laurent, appears headed for such distinction.

Her Bill C-419 calls for those who hold the 10 positions under the Officer of Parliament designation — from the auditor general, established in 1868, to the commissioner of lobbying, established in 2008 — to be able to understand English and French without the assistance of interpretation, and express themselves clearly in both languages.

After some early hesitation, it is now reported that the prime minister has come around to supporting the proposal and most of the Conservative majority caucus is thus likely to follow suit. Both the Liberals and, of course, the Bloc Québécois, have already signalled their backing for the legislation.

As Latendresse noted in tabling her bill, Parliament operates in both official languages. And while some parliamentarians are bilingual and some speak only English or only French, officers of Parliament should be able to communicate in both languages. This is especially important for officers who operate independently of the government of the day and are responsible to Parliament as a whole, and thus report directly to parliamentarians of both the Commons and the Senate.

As Latendresse further noted, the bilingualism requirement in their case indicates to francophones in Quebec and the rest of Canada that the country’s French fact is taken seriously at the highest level of government.

She presented the bill in reaction to the appointment of Michael Ferguson as auditor general, even though Ferguson’s French was plainly insufficient to qualify him as bilingual, and even though one of the clearly stated qualifications for this particular job has been that its holder must be bilingual.

While Ferguson’s numbers-crunching skill was not in any doubt — he had previously served as auditor general in New Brunswick — the appointment was stiffly criticized by opposition parties and the official languages commissioner, Graham Fraser. As Fraser said at the time, a high-profile appointment such as Ferguson’s in defiance not just of standing convention, but the express stipulation that the candidate be bilingual, creates a very damaging impression of the government’s commitment to official bilingualism.

It has been suggested that Harper used the Ferguson appointment as a trial balloon to test the public mood with respect to the Official Languages Act that enshrines the country’s bilingual status. If such was the case, he apparently got bracing feedback from within his own ranks. Conservative MPs and Sen- ators were reported to be strongly in favour of the NDP member’s bill, and cabinet minister Maxime Bernier is said to have gone so far as to offer his resignation from his ministerial post so as to be able to freely vote for the measure.

Fraser further said in an interview following the election of the Parti Québécois government that this is a particularly crucial time for the federal government to get it right on official bilingualism. Indeed, the message must be made very clear that Quebec does not have a monopoly on the French language, and that both English and French are Canadian languages in all parts of the country — and that neither is a foreign language, as Quebec’s education minister recently referred to English.

Now that the prime minister has come around on the issue, and reportedly admitted to his caucus that the Ferguson appointment was ill-advised, nothing could send that message more strongly than for parliamentarians to stand in unanimous support of this bill.