Official bilingualism in the public service of Canada

Because Canada has, for over two centuries, contained both English- and French-speakers, the question of the language used in the administration of public affairs has always been a sensitive issue.

Among the aspect of this issue that have excited public attention from time to time are:

The issue of proportional hiring and promotion of speakers of both official languages has been an issue in Canadian politics since before Confederation. Members of each linguistic group have, at different times in the country’s history, complained of injustice when their group have been represented, in public service hiring and promotion, in numbers less than would be justified by their proportion of the national population.

For the greater part of Canada’s history, French-speakers were underrepresented, and English-speakers were overrepresented in the ranks of the public service. This disproportion became more pronounced in the more senior ranks of the Public Service. However, this trend has reversed itself in recent decades. Today, French is the first official language of 23% of Canada's population, with 29.2% of Public Service of Canada employees identifying French as their first official language, including 32% of management-level jobs.

The first high-profile complaint of preferential hiring took place in 1834. One of the Ninety-Two Resolutions of the Lower Canadian House of Assembly drew attention to the fact that French Canadians, who at the time were 88% of the colony's population, held only 30% of the posts in the 157-member colonial civil service. Moreover, the resolution stated, French Canadians were, "for the most part, appointed to the inferior and less lucrative offices, and most frequently only obtaining even them, by becoming the dependent of those [British immigrants] who hold the higher and the more lucrative offices...."

With the advent of responsible government in the 1840s, the power to make civil service appointments was transferred to elected politicians, who had a strong incentive to ensure that French Canadian voters did not feel that they were being frozen out of hiring and promotions. Although no formal reform of the hiring and promotion process was ever undertaken, the patronage-driven hiring process seems to have produced a more equitable representation of the two language groups. In 1863, the public service of the united Province of Canada (which included both of the former colonies of Lower Canada and Upper Canada) had grown to include 450 officials at its administrative headquarters. Of these, 161 persons, or about 36%, were French Canadians. However, French-speaking civil servants accounted for only 20% of the total payroll, suggesting that they were mainly confined to the lower ranks of the colonial administration.

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Wikipedia