While I was busy listening to energy executives speak to a subcommittee of the Industry Committee, Treasury Board President Vic Toews was appearing before the Standing Committee on Official Languages.
Toews (left) was there to discuss a “Study of the Transfer of Certain Duties Related to Official Languages from the Canada Public Service Agency to the Treasury Board.”
Conservatives say that during the committee's proceedings, Liberal MPs Pablo Rodriguez and Jean Claude D'Amours told Toews he was unfit to serve because he does not speak both official languages. Toews, born in Fildelfia, Paraguay in 1952 and a former attorney general of Manitoba, speaks Spanish, German and English. About one of every five voters in his riding of Provencher is a francophone. And yet, as Toews says, he has always won the polls in the franchophone areas of his riding.
“English or French may not be my first language and I may not have been born in this country but I would not have believed that the Liberal members on the Official Languages committee from Honore- Mercier (Pablo Rodriguez) and Madawaska – Restigouche (Jean-Claude D'Amours) – would tell me (and millions of other Canadians) that because I do not speak both official languages we are unfit for public office,” Toews told me.
But Rodriguez (born in Argentina, incidentally), in an interview after Question Period, said Toews is over-reacting. He and D'Amours were critical of Toews for two reasons. First, he said, a minister of the Crown who is supervising a bilingual federal program ought to be bilingual. Second, in Rodriguez' view, Toews was not well briefed on the matters that he was to speak to the committee about.
My colleague Mike De Souza was at the Languages committee and will have the full play-by-play shortly.
Incidently about 20% of the riding of Provencher is fluent in German as well. As someone who lives here, English is the most comon language used, but not even close to the only one. Not to mention that 95% of the francophones here speak and understand english as well.
Maybe the Liberal Party is going to put all Canadians on probation if unable to speak French. That should unite the country!!!
Personally I think it is time to end the enforced Official Bilingual Policy of Canada. It is a total failure. And only seems to apply now in English Canada and not Quebec. Let's end the 700 Billion Taxpayer Dollar boondoggle. This is further proof to me that no English speaker should ever vote for any party that has a Leader from Quebec. In fact Federal political parties no longer need to win Quebec to control parliament. All they need is rural Ontario and Western Canada.
Oh, for Pete's sake! If being a minister required proficiency in both official languages, Jean Chretien would never have become PM. He massacred both languages. Same goes for some MPs who are often presented as “bilingual.”
And anyway, if all MPs were fluently bilingual, all those translators scrambling to convey a speaker's words into the other official language would be out of work …
Sure, let's go ahead and make an MP's experience and skills a litmus test for his/her prospective Cabinet appointment. Hell that ought to apply to the Opposition critics too.
Toews cannot speak both official languages, therefore in the estimation of two Liberal MPs he is unfit to render civil service policy on bilingualism.
I wonder where that leaves Denis Coderre (Defence critic). Which regiment did he serve in, again?
And Mark Holland (Public Safety, National Security), which police force did he retire out of?
Geoff Regan (Natural Resources), he's a geologist, isn't he? Oh, lawyer. Go figure.
Judy Sgro (Veteran's Affairs), surely she's an ex-soldier too, no?
Joe Volpe (Transportation) must surely have been a pilot, trucker or merchant seaman before he was an educator.