There are certain inconveniences, more or less serious, with which we had to learn to deal because they seem inevitable: climate change, waiting in the emergency room, orange cones, Denis Coderre’s returns…
The difficulty of traveling in French on Air Canada is another. Since the adoption of the first Official Languages Act in 1969, this former state company, privatized in 1988-1989, has systematically won the championship of offenders.
Year after year, the report from the Office of the Commissioner of Official Languages lists its infractions and multiplies its recommendations. Despite the carrier’s calming declarations on the importance it places on bilingualism, nothing is happening: the list continues to grow, and this chronic delinquent does not seem to suffer any inconvenience that could prompt it to make corrections. .
The 2022-2023 report showed a tripling of complaints compared to previous years, if we except that of 2021-2022, when the discovery of the unilingualism of its CEO, Michael Rousseau, who was even congratulated, had caused a real explosion.
The duty reported this week on a preliminary report from the Commissioner of Official Languages, who followed up on his recommendations from recent years and found that none of them had been implemented. Air Canada has not been able to provide the slightest document demonstrating that the “positive measures” it said it had taken really were taken.
As usual, Commissioner Raymond Théberge tried to contain his exasperation in the reaction he sent to the Duty by email, but you can easily read between the lines. “As the follow-up of the recommendations is ongoing, I must limit my comments. However, I would like to reiterate that it still happens too often that Air Canada fails to meet its linguistic obligations, whether through the absence of an active offer, an insufficient number of bilingual employees or signage in only one official language. . »
This new report did not seem to trouble Air Canada in the slightest. “We are proud to offer services in both official languages of Canada for more than 50 years, in an industry with complex rules, while serving our clients in more than 20 languages in 51 countries in addition to Canada, and we will continue to offer our collaboration to the Commissioner of Official Languages in this objective,” indicated a spokesperson. In short, the commissioner can continue to quibble, who cares.
Francophones from one end of the country to the other can only see the speed at which their language is being evacuated from the public space. We perhaps omit it less out of pettiness than in the absence of a necessity which would make law, but the result is the same. Air Canada perfectly reflects Canada today. Take as is or leave it.
During the last municipal election in Calgary, in 2021, the Association canadienne-française de l’Alberta had to file a complaint so that a French version of the voter’s guide was made available. Initially, French was not one of the 10 languages into which it had been translated.
Last December, in Winnipeg, we sang a verse of the national anthem in Punjabi before the Jets game, which was nothing scandalous in itself, but there was nothing in French. After all, if the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms was able to introduce the rule of “where numbers warrant” in an area as important as education, is it any wonder that this rule is applied in an amphitheater or on board a plane?
In March 2023, the Legault government was delighted that Air Canada finally agreed to submit to the provisions of the Charter of the French Language regarding language of work, after having initially refused.
In its press release, the company explained that its decision reflected “its desire to contribute to the protection, promotion and influence of the French language, in compliance with the Official Languages Act which applies to the carrier”.
This reference to the Official Languages Act is somewhat perplexing. If Air Canada complies with the requirements of the Charter of the French Language with the same respect for its obligations towards French as it has demonstrated for half a century, there is cause for concern.
It is to be hoped that the Office québécois de la langue française will be more successful than the Office of the Commissioner of Official Languages of Canada, but it should not always be easy to work in a language for a company that cannot offer services in this language to its customers.