Bilingualism

By David Reevely

OTTAWA - Nobody knows how much Canada's experiment with official bilingualism has cost.

There are official figures: about $486 million in federal spending last year, says the Treasury Board — the agency that keeps the Canadian government's books. A lot of people say those numbers are rubbish.

As far back as 1991, when official spending was peaking at around $650 million, a royal commission on Canadian unity looked into the bilingualism program.

The commission, headed by Keith Spicer, found that while most Canadians saw bilingualism as a positive quality in a person, they were suspicious of it as federal policy. One person quoted in the commission's report condemned it as a waste of $4 to 5 billion a year; another said it cost $10 billion.

Official figures
In fact, two agencies do most of the government's spending in this area. Heritage Canada allocates money outside the federal government. Here is the breakdown from last year:
- $167 million went to the provinces and territories for bilingualism in areas of provincial responsibility — such as French-immersion education programs and minority-language health care. 
- $26 million went straight into minority-language community groups, such as Alliance Quebec for anglophones in that province. 
- $26.6 million was spent on "promotion and dialogue" to publicize the benefits of the bilingualism policy.
- $12 million went to the Office of the Commissioner of Official Languages, the watchdog agency headed by Dyane Adam (and once headed by Keith Spicer) that keeps track of the government's bilingualism initiatives. It reports directly to Parliament and is not part of Heritage Canada.

The Treasury Board is the other main agency that funds bilingualism policy. Here is what they did with the money last year:
- $255 million was spent for "internal" purposes. That went to the government's own translation bureau, to language training for federal employees, and to the $800 bonus fluently bilingual public servants receive.

The $486-million total, Treasury Board spokesman Edison Stewart points out, is about 0.45 per cent of all federal spending. He and other federal officials are at pains to make clear that both absolute and relative spending on bilingualism have been in decline since 1990-91, when the government spent $651.9 million on it - 0.6 per cent of that year's overall federal budget.

In all, according to Stewart's figures, the federal government has spent about $12.8 billion (not adjusted for inflation) on official bilingualism since Pierre Trudeau's Liberals passed the Official Languages Act in 1969.
Some costs not included

But, say the policy's critics, there are billions of dollars that the government doesn't take into account.
In 1993, Scott Reid published Lament for a Notion. The book argues that while official bilingualism was a noble experiment, it has been an expensive failure.

"The government says how much it spends on language training," Reid says by way of example, "but it doesn't say how much it costs for people to cover the duties of (employees) who are away for training."

There is a dizzying array of other difficult-to-measure costs, says Reid, from the expense of extended job searches to find bilingual people, to additional interest charges on a national debt that might have been lower without the bilingualism policy.

In his book, Reid wrote that bilingualism had cost about $49 billion, all told.

"I haven't done the numbers since then," Reid now says, though he has hired someone to update his findings. "It's only gone up, though. The government hasn't changed its approach."

Fiercer critics of the policy say that there are also intangible costs — that the government could be more efficient if it hired people purely on the basis of merit, rather than taking language proficiency as a major criterion.

Catherine Scott, of the official languages commissioner's office, says bilingualism does constitute additional merit.

"I don't see how anyone could argue that someone who speaks more than one language isn't more qualified than someone who doesn't," Scott says.
Jim Allan, a retired Toronto accountant, is one of the fierce critics.

"The Canadian people are being taken to the cleaners," he says. A fair accounting, says Allan, has to examine the amount spent by the provinces and by private companies complying with bilingualism rules.

Impossible to measure
"The only way you could do that is by knocking on the door at every major corporation in the country," says Scott. "We have a study on the cost of bilingual labels, but everything else is too deeply hidden. Those numbers just don't exist."

Allan pegs the cost of bilingualism at an average $7 billion a year since the passage of the Act, and says it's up to about $18 billion a year now.

"I see this as so incredibly draining of our resources for the benefit of one province: Quebec," he says.

Scott says it's not her agency's mandate to do the accounting for the whole country's bilingualism spending. Edison Stewart of the Treasury Board says his agency can only keep track of the numbers for the federal government.

Reid says what's needed is a separate reckoning of the costs. He says Spicer, when he was languages commissioner, "to his credit, attempted to do his own version of it," but failed without the necessary support staff.

"I think that the costs are high, and (federal officials) don't want them to be widely known," says Reid. "So nobody even tries to assess them."

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