New round of Treasury Board rules will unfairly put a pause on the careers of English-only speakers in the federal government

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In the name of language rights, the federal government is trampling on the career prospects of thousands of public service employees. Why? Because they have the misfortune of not speaking advanced French.

Discriminatory though it may be, that’s the new direction at the Treasury Board of Canada, which will be requiring all new supervisors in bilingual regions (including Ottawa, where much of the public service is based) to speak official languages at a “superior” level in June 2025. Currently, supervisors in bilingual zones must speak their second official language at an “intermediate” level.

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Effectively, it’s a lockdown on the career advancement of anglophones.

But that’s how it goes in Canada, where the Official Languages Act has been weaponized by the current federal government. Largely used as a shield in the past, largely to protect the country’s French-speaking language minority, the law is being wielded as a sword, justifying the retraction of opportunities from people who comprise the majority of the population.

It’s not fair, and that’s the point — like so many other “equity” measures taken by the Liberals.

For context, English speakers make up 76 per cent of the Canadian population, according to Statistics Canada. They’re also largely unilingual: outside Quebec, just over seven per cent of this group also speaks French. French speakers inside Quebec, in contrast, are roughly 40 per cent bilingual. The Treasury Board’s new rules therefore take a lot more opportunities away from English speakers around the country than they do French speakers.

Which, for this government, makes this........

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