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4.6 Official Languages, Visible Minorities and Career Mobility
The last question here, and one that was at the heart of this investigation,
is whether or not we saw any evidence - perceived and/or tangible - that would
affirm the perception of specific barriers in the application of the official
languages policies for visible minority public servants. Our findings relative
to this question are clear: The barriers we heard described are not accurately
described as things lived or experiencd in official language policies that are
specific to visible minorities. Moreover, what we found suggests that barriers
do exist, but that they exist in a non-specific fashion for public servants in
general.
Otherwise, visible minority participants did indicate the following:
- That they generally agree with the official languages policies, and
understand the principles behind them.
- Generally, visible minority participants tend also to endorse the
stipulation that people who aspire to executive levels should be bilingual,
and tend to consider the second official language simply as another
prerequisite skill to obtaining that level.
- Quite clearly, the vast majority of visible minority participants we spoke
to consider that they are no more able or unable to acquire a second
official language than any other group of public servants. Notwithstanding
this widespread conviction that visible minority groups confront the same
learning curve, we occasionally heard suspicions that recent immigrants may
confront a higher hurdle with respect to their access to language training
than some others. This perspective, however, was always projected as a
possibility, and never described as something participants had experienced
directly.
- Generally, the visible minority participants we spoke with consider the
federal public service to have provided more than adequate opportunities,
and generally equitable treatment in all important respects.
A few participants, and occasionally from within the non-visible minority
groups, we heard of a desire that the stipulations of the official languages
policies be relaxed for the benefit of recent immigrants, or even more rarely,
for the benefit of multilingual visible minorities. The logic behind this
proposal is that a capacity to speak several languages, even if they do not
include both French and English, nonetheless constitutes a specific advantage
for an employer such as the Government of Canada. In this sense, a few
participants suggested that the policies could and should be more flexible in
these cases. Here again, however, this desire for flexibility seems to reflect a
spirit of accommodation rather than any sense of injustice or inequity, and when
pressed to articulate a system or a set of rules for determining how, when and
where such "flexibility" should be exercised, most are unable. This
inability, and the consistent retreat to the existing rules we see among those
who would ask for more flexibility would seem to underscore the essential
soundness of the policies.
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