Canada's Official Languages: Policy versus Work Practice in the Federal Public Service by Helaina Gaspard (review)

Helaina Gaspard is a political scientist, and director for governance and institutions at the Institute of Fiscal Studies and Democracy at the University of Ottawa. In this study of Canadian official language policy, she focuses not on its implementation in the services provided to the public–although she does give a useful timeline of how their statutory and policy framing has evolved–but on implementation within the federal public service itself: most concretely, regarding employees' individual right to work in the official language of their choice.

The study begins with an exploration of potential theoretical models for such an enquiry (hinting strongly at the book's origins in doctoral research), opting for a fusion of two approaches from the political-science toolbox: historical institutionalism and layering. Both approaches centrally incorporate a historical perspective, the former concentrating on critical junctures–moments of major and sudden change and reorientation, such as the Official Languages Acts of 1968 and 1988, and the Charter of Canadian Rights and Freedoms of 1982–and the latter on ways in which a sequence of smaller events and innovations 'layer onto' and modify prevailing practice in complex and sometimes contradictory ways: successive policy and strategy statements, court cases and conflict resolutions. Among the interesting insights that her approach highlights is how the Charter shifted the focus in the federal government's pursuit of bilingualism away from political compromise to questions of individuals' civil rights. Gaspard charts how Pierre Trudeau set out to defuse the threat of Québec separatism by enshrining bilingual rights (in practice, francophone rights) as federally guaranteed individual rights across Canada rather than as a concession to collective demands by the only majority-francophone province. This quintessentially liberal focus on the individual rather than the collective was then given legal reinforcement by the Charter. Moreover, individual concerns, e.g. for professional career prospects, underlay many of the tensions for individual employees (whether anglophone or francophone) within the federal service; and individual managers' lack of interest and/or reluctance in addressing their employees' language rights also slowed or hampered official policy implementation.

Disappointingly, but understandably, given the theoretical approach, there is mention but surprisingly little exploration of practical feasibility issues in rejigging an overwhelmingly monolingually anglophone institution to function in a genuinely bilingual manner. This is a work of political science and organisational theory rather than of language policy, and there are strikingly few references to language policy research literature. Nonetheless, the resulting study brings a valuable different perspective to language policy research as well, which, as Gaspard notes, has tended to focus on how language policy innovation is embedded in sociopolitical and cultural context and on how it impacts on society and the public, and to overlook the significance of institution-internal factors in innovatory policy implementation.