this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2024
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This is mind boggling to me. Everyone I've met in the PS with any kind of supervisory role has known at least enough French to carry a conversation. And all managers need to be CCC. How is anybody ending up in a position where they can't use their preferred official language?
Being bilingual is a metric for hiring, so some people who can say "Jim apple George" or "monet es George" will call themselves bilingual. So knowing enough to be hired, and knowing enough to actually do the job are two different things.
So, if I work at the CRA, and I go into a meeting where we're discussing some finer points about the tax code, and how it interacts with a s85(1) rollover or eligible vs non-eligible dividends, am I going to speak a language that I am confident that everyone in the room actually knows, or the one that I might need to repeat myself 15 times or make a mistake in front of everyone at work and look stupid?
Another (better) article that this article sites:
For rank and file this is true, but there is a certification process for supervisors.
But I can see the other points being relevant, especially about technical jargon with colleagues. I guess I'm lucky that almost everyone I work with knows enough of both languages to flip back and forth as needed. The french training in my dept is excellent.
Didn't join the site to download the pdf, but it looks like it is trying to find a correlation between wanting to leave the public service and answering a survey question about how often you can use your preferred language. As such, I am not sure if they have any follow up queations on why people answered what they did in the survey, but it could be as simple as they have to interact with unilingual people. Even if they have a bilingual boss (who, even at CCC may not be very good), they may not have bilingual clients or team mates and therefore have to work in one language most of the time.
IT in particular can be tricky, since most things are only English. A lot of software tools only come in English, and a big chunk of vendor support is from the US and often does not have a French option. The contractor pool is also largely English since the Canadian private sector doesn't require bilingualism for tech workers.
Yes even if your supervisor is bilingual, it's still possible that your office has a dominant language by virtue of the majority.
But anyone who works in IT knows that the price of entry is knowing a certain amount of English, so I would be surprised that IT workers are the ones complaining. They wouldn't have completed whatever postsecondary taught them IT without learning the basics in English. It's baked into the industry. Like how biologists need to learn Latin names.