5.0 Summation
This research process has shed light on the perceptions and experiences of
public servants vis-à-vis official languages, visible minorities and career
mobility. Among other things, we found:
- Considerable issues surrounding perceptions and understanding of official
language policies themselves. The policy is imperfectly understood in many
quarters, has a tendency to be exaggerated in terms of its actual demand on
public servants, and is interpreted in widely different terms depending on
one's official language and relative bilingualism. This imperfect
understanding can be reasonably construed as the source of many of the
perceived barriers linked to official languages for all public servants.
- That official languages policies do, in fact, pose tangible barriers for
the career mobility of public servants to the degree that the policies
demand certain language capabilities as the "price of entry" to
some levels of the Public Service. These exigencies are undeniably
controversial in that their fundamental logic and underlying rationale are
not unanimously shared across the diversity of public servants. In addition,
the issue of resources and institutional commitment to these policies
emerged as a compounding factor: Access to training is limited, and this
emerges as an additional barrier that is perceived to affect different
groups differently.
- That visible minorities have issues with respect to their career mobility
in the public service that are perceived to be a function of the attitudes
of non visible minorities, and of the government's organizational culture,
albeit never overtly described as a manifestation of racism or
discrimination. In general terms, however, we heard that the public service
still has some room for improvement in this sense, and it does stand to
reason that these aspects of attitude and culture may affect visible
minority public servants in the language arena.
- Finally, some specific public servants, notably those who are recent
immigrants to Canada whose native language is other than French or English
have specific issues and a specific burden with respect to the overall
demands of the public service, the demands of official language policies,
and the relative hurdles they face in acquiring them. In the simplest terms,
people who speak neither French nor English, or who possess a large number
of languages are perceived to face specific and unique conditions in
confronting this environment and these demands.
Ultimately, if our mandate in this research process was to shed light on the
nature of the problem, our findings suggest that while the initial premise is
not substantiated, there is considerable evidence here to suggest why it
continues to be asserted.
