French is hurting at the federal level. He is hardly better off in private enterprise. A brief portrait of bilingualism in the private sector.
Canada’s Commissioner of Official Languages, Raymond Théberge, tabled his 2022-2023 annual report in Parliament at the end of May. It contains the same denunciations repeated many times in the past, in particular the failure to respect the language rights of federal civil servants and the traveling public (which particularly concerns Air Canada and airport authorities).
In 2022-2023, the Commissioner accepted a total of 1,788 admissible complaints – including 276 only for Air Canada. Of this first number, 810 related to communications with the public and service delivery, including 497 on services to the traveling public, and 207 on language of work. In 79% of cases, the complaints related to an incident relating to the use of French.
The Commissioner’s observation: “2022-2023 has once again demonstrated that the future of official languages in all of Canada’s provinces and territories is far from certain. »
This observation leads us to examine the state of French in private sector companies. Of course, the Official Languages Act does not apply to everyone.
According to Statistics Canada, employment in the federal public service (department and agencies) accounted for just under 2% of total employment last May. As for the state of access to bilingual services in the private sector in Canada, 23.3% of businesses offered at least one type of bilingual service or conducted at least one business activity in French and English in 2022. (This is the case for 53.6% of businesses located in Quebec.)
In fact, based on geographic distribution, just over half (51.6%) of Canadian businesses offering at least one type of bilingual service or conducting at least one business activity in French and English in 2022 were located in Quebec, says Statistics Canada’s Canadian Business Conditions Survey released in early June.
Unilingualism and other combinations
In Quebec, among businesses that did not offer at least one bilingual service, 85.2% offered services only in French and 1.9% only in English. The others relied on a combination of French or English and a non-official language, or even answered “not applicable” or “don’t know”, specifies Statistics Canada in an email in response to a question asked.
In other words, if we exclude Quebec and New Brunswick, the proportion of private businesses offering at least one service in both official languages rises to 14.6% in the rest of Canada. We can talk here about customer service, internal or external communications, signage, or even simply a website in French and English.
Breaking down a bit, more than four out of ten businesses offered bilingual services to customers in Quebec (43.2%) and New Brunswick (40.8%). More than a third of businesses located in these two provinces (37.2% in Quebec and 34.2% in New Brunswick) had sales activities in both official languages and more than a quarter had a bilingual website (31.8 % and 25.3%). In the rest of Canada, this was the case for less than one in ten businesses for each of these three types of service or business activity, adds the federal statistics agency.
This all has to be put into perspective that in 2021, nearly 16 million of the 21 million Canadian workers spoke English at work. Seen otherwise, 4 million had French as the language used at work, including 3.8 million in Quebec.
Bilingual positions…
Last year, approximately 1 million or 7.9% of corporate positions in Canada required French-English bilingualism, according to respondents’ estimates. “The largest contingent of these positions requiring bilingualism in the private sector was in Quebec, which had nearly 750,000 bilingual positions in 2022, or just over a quarter (25.6%) of business jobs in this province. , adds Statistics Canada.
More than two-thirds of businesses offering certain bilingual services in Quebec and more than half of those in New Brunswick required bilingualism for some of their positions in 2022, compared to less than a quarter in the rest of Canada.
… and labor shortage
Moreover, bilingualism can be considered an asset in the private sector without however constituting a requirement of employment, in particular in the context of a labor shortage, adds the federal agency. Across Canada, 46.3% of businesses that reported offering bilingual services required bilingualism for some of their positions. This proportion was higher in Quebec (69.5%) and New Brunswick (56.1%) than in the rest of Canada (22.8%).
Recruitment difficulties are therefore felt. In a context of labor shortage, among the 252,000 businesses (out of a total of more than 1 million private establishments) that offered bilingual services in Canada, 16.8% stated that recruiting employees able to work in both French and English will be an obstacle. This percentage was highest in Quebec, at 20.6%.