The Sixth Estate

The Fraser Institute’s first report of the new year is a strident attack on provincial bilingualism policies which attempts to count the costs of providing services to minority populations and, predictably, argues that the best solution is to “privatize” these services, meaning that either the government or, preferably, private citizens will be required to hire a private-sector translator whenever a service is provided in the “wrong” official language. Provincial spending on bilingualism, they say, “costs Canadian taxpayers… $900 million annually.”

Since it’s the Fraser Institute, you won’t be at all surprised to learn that a few corners are cut here. First of all, a large majority of this funding goes to minority-language schools which are guaranteed under the Constitution. We can’t open a debate about reforming Francophone schools without reopening the Constitution. This doesn’t appear to faze the Fraser Institute, of course. Bilingualism costs outside of the education system are actually “only” $223 million, and despite what the brief claims, it’s unclear how much cheaper they could get through privatization.

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I’m probably the last person in the country to weigh in on the Harper regime’s English-only Supreme Court judges and Auditor-General. But since nobody I’ve read has yet said the only thing worth saying on this subject, I’m going to do so anyways. Plus, my interest was piqued by a scurrilous column by apparently well-meaning Lysiane Gagnon in the Globe & Mail this morning, which claims that it’s okay for a Supreme Court judge to be unilingual but not for an Auditor-General to be. The (il)logic is stupefying.

As someone living in the heart of Anglophone-land (aka Western Canada), I’ve come to expect a fairly standard response when I raise this subject. “Are you really saying you don’t think you should be allowed to be a judge or a commissioner if you wanted to be?” people say. “These appointments should be based on merit alone.” That’s what Gagnon said, too. But what they don’t seem to understand is that in a bilingual country, being able to speak both languages is “merit.” If you can’t meet that job criterion, you don’t deserve the job. The fact that translators exist is irrelevant. This is like saying that you deserve a job as a delivery driver despite having no driver’s license, because at least your friend has one.

And that’s just our side of the equation. The real question we should be asking is: do we honestly think highly qualified a judge who is so conceited, arrogant, and ignorant that he is agreeing to take up a job where he will be expected to render learned opinions in a language he can’t even read?

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