Standing Committee on Official Languages

HOUSE OF COMMONS CHAMBRE DES COMMUNES OTTAWA, CANADA K1A 0A6

Comité permanent des langues officielles

For immediate release

Ottawa, June 18, 2009 -

The House of Commons Standing Committee on Official Languages made this observation in its most recent report “5,000 Positions to be Filled Every Year: The Role of Postsecondary Institutions in Promoting Canada’s Linguistic Duality.”

According to the report, Canada’s postsecondary institutions, particularly Anglophone institutions, do not fully realize the federal public service’s huge need for bilingual employees. The federal government, which is by far the largest employer in Canada, will have to hire between 12,000 and 15,000 new employees each year to replace retiring public servants. This means that the number of employees that the government will hire each year is larger than General Motors’ entire Canadian workforce in 2008. Between 5,000 and 6,000 of these positions are designated bilingual, including all senior management positions, and a large majority of these jobs require postsecondary education. The Committee is concerned about the ability of postsecondary institutions to produce enough bilingual graduates to fill the positions. Postsecondary institutions have dropped the language competency requirements for admission or graduation, and the percentage of young people between 15 and 19 who are bilingual has been declining for about 15 years.

The Committee prepared 11 recommendations to address these issues, the main one being that the government develop a recruitment strategy for bilingual personnel that sends a clear message to Canada’s postsecondary institutions, particularly Anglophone institutions, about the needs of the federal public service. Other recommendations concern federal support for immersion programs, teacher training, student mobility programs and the critical role of Francophone postsecondary institutions in minority settings.

The Government of Canada cannot tell postsecondary institutions what to do since it does not have jurisdiction over them and it must respect their academic independence. What the government can do is send a strong and clear message about its own needs: between 5,000 and 6,000 positions in a wide range of fields will have to be filled, year after year, as part of the renewal of the public service. Committee members are very hopeful that postsecondary institutions will respond to this message. It is in the interest of postsecondary institutions to do so, and this would support the federal government’s commitment to providing all citizens with exemplary service and to strengthening Canada’s linguistic duality, which is more than ever a fundamental aspect of Canadian identity.

The report is available electronically on the Committee’s website at www.parl.gc.ca/LANG-e.