Affirmative action, bilingualism and the civil service

The chances of a unilingual white guy getting a federal public service job in the National Capital Region (NCR, i.e. Ottawa and Gatineau--where about 1/3 of all "core" public servants work) are slim indeed. Randall Denley of the Ottawa Citizen explains:

... The turning point for unilingual Canadians came in 2004, when the federal government determined that its language training program wasn't terribly effective. Rather than let go of the dream of a bilingual workplace, it began to demand that public servants in bilingual-designated areas like the national capital region have a high level of bilingual proficiency just to get hired. Departments still offer some language training, but the days of a unilingual person getting a position and then learning the second language are largely over.

The language equality policy is a conflicting tangle of rules that falls far short of its stated goal. The only employees with a right to work in their own language are those at the lowest level. Once a person reaches even the first level of supervisory responsibility, she must be bilingual so that her employees can work in their language of choice. English-speaking supervisors would have a right to be supervised themselves in their own language, but it's a moot point because they rarely get the jobs.

In effect, this policy means that all but the lowest-level employees in a region like ours must be bilingual. Even those jobs are now hard to get. When a department like Public Works designates entry-level jobs as bilingual imperative, unilingual Canadians can't even get a foot in the door. For example, last year Public Works posted job openings for 39 administrative and business support clerks. Each and every one of these jobs was designated bilingual imperative.

[...]

What once might have been a well-meaning attempt to create a bilingual utopia has degenerated into a nonsensical hiring regime that actually denies federal government employment opportunities to the majority of Canadians. Only 17.7 per cent of Canadians are bilingual and only 8.8 per cent of anglophones can speak both official languages. The situation is nearly as bad for visible minorities, only 11.5 per cent of whom speak both French and English.

Here is the cold reality. In the national capital region, our federal government is only interested in people with a high degree of bilingualism. Other Canadians aren't welcome, and if they do manage to get on the first rung of the employment ladder, they will be stuck there.

That's grossly unfair to the majority of the Canadian population and it greatly narrows the talent pool for the federal government. That makes it bad public policy. It's high time the federal government woke up and did something about it.

As Mr Denley note, visible minorities--the great majority of whom live in Toronto, Vancouver or Montreal--don't do well in the bilingualism game (I'm amazed they seem to do better than anglophones). So the government's public service bilingualism policy is effectively in contradiction with its policy encouraging the hiring of visible minorities.

...getting more racial minorities into the public service has been a federal priority since the Liberals approved targets in 2000 recommended by the Embracing Change task force. It called for one in five new hires to be a visible minority by 2003. Similarly, one in five promotions into the executive ranks was to be a visible minority by 2005 [and virtually all executive jobs across the country are bilingual imperative - MC]...

And for the odd job that is not bilingual imperative in the NCR the visible minority will be preferred over the white person.

Here's how visible minorities are defined:

A person in a visible minority group is someone (other than an Aboriginal person as defined above) who is non-white in colour/race, regardless of place of birth and is from one of the following groups: Black, Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, Korean, South Asian-East Indian (including Indian from India; Bangladeshi; Pakistani; East Indian from Guyana, Trinidad, East Africa; etc.), Southeast Asian (including Burmese; Cambodian; Laotian; Thai; Vietnamese; etc.) non-white West Asian, North African or Arab (including Egyptian; Libyan; Lebanese; etc.), non-white Latin American (including indigenous persons from Central and South America, etc.), and persons of mixed origin with one parent in one of the visible minority groups listed above.

I'd like to know what is the standard to determine (and how it is applied) who is "non-white West Asian, North African or Arab" or "non-white Latin American". What's the whiteness meter? Have we consulted people with experience in Apartheid-era South Africa? What a mess of conflicting good intentions producing results that end up favouring in the extreme bilingual, Canadian-born, white francophones.

Will the Conservative government address the inequities of these policies inherited from the Liberals? When cochons fly, my dears. There's votes in them thar belle province:

... So far Quebec gets $660 million, Ontario and Western Canada each $341 million (what an astounding coincidence!!!), and Atlantic Canada $290 million...

Er, nation.

Mark C.

Posted by markc at January 29, 2008 05:56 PM