The Ontario government has only acted on two of the nine recommendations of the French Language Services Commissioner of Ontario since taking office in 2020. Kelly Burke’s most recent annual report, released on Wednesday, takes stock of these first two annual reports and its special investigation into the cuts to Laurentian University in Sudbury.
Some of the shortcomings identified by the commissioner date back almost three years. It notes, among other things, that the Ministry of Francophone Affairs lacks rigor in updating and drafting the designation regulations of the French Language Services Act. This regulation lists all the organizations in the province that have voluntarily obtained designation and that must therefore offer services in French to their clients. In her first report, Kelly Burke indicated that the list was not up to date; it now recommends the ministry develop a plan by September 2023 to update the regulations.
In her first report, the French Language Services Commissioner also recommended that each Deputy Minister submit to Executive Council a plan that reports annually on the implementation of the French Language Services Act in their respective department and that these plans part of an annual report by the Minister of Francophone Affairs, tabled in the Legislative Assembly. However, the ministry’s first annual activity report, filed in April 2022, “did not contain information about the ministries’ service plans,” the report reads. The plans would not have been produced in time.
In total, the Commissioner’s office handled 277 cases, including complaints and requests for information, between 1er October 2021 and September 30, 2022. The commissioner’s office was unable to say how many of these cases were complaints. This is a 20% decrease in cases since the last report. The sixty complaints against Laurentian University, which had slashed dozens of programs during a restructuring under judicial supervision, had then boosted the number of cases.
This story is supported by the Local Journalism Initiative, funded by the Government of Canada.
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