Canada’s very first Commissioner of Official Languages, Keith Spicer, identified what he considered to be the source of Air Canada’s chronic deficiencies with regard to the obligations of the air carrier, then a Crown corporation, to deliver services in French. It was simply the lack of will of its leaders.
“There is not a single problem, technical or administrative, posed by the linguistic reform that Air Canada could not solve if its attitude were different, concluded Mr. Spicer towards the end of his mandate, in 1976. Unfortunately, she approached the language question with fear and mistrust and took refuge in a negative attitude. It is therefore not surprising that its employees understood that respecting the linguistic choice of passengers was not a high priority. “
Four decades later, in 2016, Commissioner Graham Fraser took up Mr. Spicer’s quote in his own report on Air Canada in order to highlight how the situation had barely changed since the 1970s.
“Like my predecessors, I used, without success, various powers conferred on me by the Act in an attempt to force Air Canada to better meet its linguistic obligations towards the traveling public,” Mr. Fraser wrote in an article. report. After hundreds of investigations and recommendations, after an exhaustive verification and after two appeals, including one to the Supreme Court of Canada, it is clear that my multiple interventions, like those of my predecessors , did not give the desired results. “
Concerns dismissed
Air Canada management, however, dismissed Fraser’s concerns out of hand. “You seem to be arguing emphatically that Air Canada’s efforts related to [Loi sur les langues officielles] are always or systematically insufficient, replied the senior vice-president and chief legal officer of Air Canada at the time, David Shapiro. We strongly object to your interpretation of Air Canada’s official languages performance. Your assessment reflects an exaggeration of the problem. “
It is hardly surprising then that Air Canada’s board of directors did not give much importance to the issue of bilingualism when it selected a new CEO for the company earlier this year. . By choosing Michael Rousseau, who had worked in Ontario and
United States before joining Air Canada in Montreal in 2007, the twelve members of the board (including two French speakers) had cited his skills in financial management, in the context where the company was still suffering the repercussions of the pandemic and was looking for a lifeline from Ottawa.
It remains astonishing all the same that Mr. Rousseau did not seem to feel the slightest embarrassment in giving a speech entirely in English on Wednesday before the Board of Trade of Metropolitan Montreal, despite the warning offered by the team of the current Commissioner of Official Languages, Raymond Théberge, wanting such a gesture to raise controversy.
It is even more astonishing that the CEO of Air Canada bragged to journalists that he had been able to live exclusively in English in Montreal for 14 years, as if he ignored the sensitivity of the language question in Quebec and the story of the struggle of francophones to preserve their language and culture in America. In front of the outcry raised by his remarks, Mr. Rousseau quickly apologized and engaged in a press release to “improve” his French. But his blunder was far too huge for him to be able to repair the damage it caused to his own reputation and that of the company he runs by formulating a simple mea culpa in a press release.
An inscription in the annals
Mr. Rousseau now deserves an inscription in the annals of history next to Donald Gordon, former big boss of the now deceased Canadian National, who, in 1962, had justified the absence of Francophones among the 17 vice-presidents of the business by suggesting that French Canadians lacked business skills. His statement had prompted André Laurendeau to write, in The duty : “Mr. Gordon has one quality: he is brutal. He says very loudly what others do as well as him but without saying it. “
Mr. Rousseau, in his own way, has just said aloud a truth that you will not find anywhere in Air Canada reports, which vow total obedience to the provisions of the Official Languages Act, even if the results on the field prove the contrary.
“Unlike government institutions subject to the Official Languages Act, Air Canada does not receive any direct or indirect funding for training, testing or communication purposes,” says the 2020-2023 Linguistic Action Plan. business. It is nevertheless important to note that Air Canada continues to increase the human and financial resources it mobilizes in order to maintain its language programs. “
In other words, French is just a financial burden for Air Canada. It’s no surprise that his CEO, an accountant by training, sees no value in it.