French Bill Draws Air Protest
www.blacklocks.ca, Paul Delahanty
A bill mandating French services in airports from St. John’s to Whitehorse is prompting protests from transport managers nationwide. Airport executives said the bill to expand the Official Languages Act will be costly and complex.
“How would airports be expected to staff positions appropriately?” said Daniel-Robert Gooch, bilingual president of the Canadian Airports Council; “There is not an airport anywhere in the country in our membership that has indicated they receive a significant number of complaints.”
Bill S-205 An Act To Amend The Official Languages Act would require “equality of service” in French and English at every federally-regulated airport and train station in every provincial and territorial capital; and every ferry terminal serving at least 100,000 passengers a year. The private Liberal bill rewrites a part of the Act that currently mandates bilingual services only in airports with a million passengers a year or those located in cities “where there is significant demand” for French, defined as 5 percent.
Testifying at the Senate languages committee, Gooch said the bill appeared impractical. “The costs could be significant for airports of any size,” he said; “I think of a standard that, in my mind, would be almost impossible to meet anywhere in the country in any type of organization. There are very few individuals who master both languages very well, and ‘equality of service’ without some clarification on what that means sounds like a difficult standard to meet. I think the further you go away from a bilingual population, the harder it would be.”
Only 18 percent of Canadians are bilingual, according to Statistics Canada. Among English-speaking provinces the bilingualism rate averages from 4.6 percent in Newfoundland & Labrador to 33 percent in New Brunswick.
“Bill S-205 is a solution for a problem that we feel does not currently exist,” said Monette Pasher, marketing director of the Charlottetown Airport Authority; “In Prince Edward Island 3.8 percent of the population report French as their mother tongue, and 2 percent speak French at home.”
Airport managers told senators that basic French signage is already provided to francophone travellers. Airports with fewer than a million passengers a year are not mandated to provide a bilingual website, though executives said increasing use is made of Google translation software.
“We should not aim to have a one-size-fits-all approach,” said Pasher; “It is a challenge to find people to work at let’s say the restaurant or Tim Hortons and be bilingual; it’s also a challenge for cab companies, where a lot of them would speak Polish.”
Executives from airports in Regina and Thunder Bay made similar complaints. The National Airlines Council of Canada also testified the bill is unwieldy.
“It’s an industry already saddled by high taxes, fees and other charges,” said Marc-André O’Rourke, executive director of the Airlines Council; “The bill would designate a number of Canadian airports as bilingual without a calculable corresponding demand.”
The bill follows a 2014 audit by the Official Languages Commissioner that surveyed bilingual airport services in six provinces. The check of signage and bilingual greetings for travellers found a 98 percent compliance rate at Ottawa’s Macdonald-Cartier airport, followed by:
•84 percent compliance at Stanfield Airport, Halifax;
•83 percent at Vancouver International;
•54 percent at Toronto’s Pearson Airport;
•51 percent at Richardson Airport, Winnipeg;
•49 percent at Edmonton International Airport.
Québec airports rated higher for providing English-language services to travellers.
“Our passengers are already paying many additional costs related to air travel on top of their base ticket price,” Richard Graham, president and CEO of the Regina Airport Authority, told the Senate languages committee. “The economic impact to our airport and our community by the proposed changes outlined in Bill S-205 are likely to be significant and drive costs to the public up further.”