MacAdam is a former provincial cabinet minister who ran and lost for the federal Tories in 2000, then went to work for Peter MacKay as a political operative; the kind of savvy, tight-lipped character who makes things happen in the backrooms.
His appointment to a $130,000-a-year public service position looks bad, in part because a bunch of other guys close to MacKay got similar jobs.
It looks like MacKay was able to exert influence to get his buddies sweet civil service jobs, which is not the way things should work. The Public Service Commission is investigating.
And MacAdam is not busy giving loans to Summerside gift shops because he's on French training in Ottawa, getting his full salary for up to two years, which is completement niaiseux.
In 1867, when Canada was established, the British North America Act provided that Parliament and the federal courts would work in both languages, and in the early days, when most civil service jobs were patronage appointments, francophones got their share of jobs. But they were eventually elbowed out by Anglos, and for many decades they could not get jobs in Ottawa, and if they did, they had to "speak white," as our racist forefathers put it.
In 1966, Prime Minister Lester Pearson established official bilingualism, and since then, under Liberal and Progressive Conservative governments, we have worked steadily toward building a bilingual civil service.
These days the senior level of public servants can all work in both languages, which is something in which we can take a bit of quiet pride.
Polls show strong and growing support for bilingualism across the country, although there are still plenty of angryphones who think the French should be made to speak English, and it is illegal in Quebec to hang an English sign on a kilt shop.
It's not perfect, but I think bilingualism is worth the cost — estimated by the Fraser institute to be $1.8 billion a year — because French Canadians must have equal rights.
If you disagree, you should go find a member of the Van Doos who fought in Panjwaii and tell him that he doesn't deserve to be served in his language.
But there's a bilingualism industry in Ottawa that is not very cost effective. Stephen Harper has a mandate to cut the fat in government, and this would be a good place to start.
I think it would be hard to find anyone — other than MacAdam and members of his family — who thinks it is wise to pay him to study French for two years. The government is paying his salary, his teacher's salary and the salary of whoever is doing his job, all so he can learn something he should have learned in university.
When the government appointed a unilingual auditor general last week, a lot of English Canadians said it's not fair to reserve such jobs for bilingual people, which misses the point. People like him — the top 100 people in the Canadian public service — must be bilingual because they must lead in both languages.
To get those sweet jobs, ambitious people work like dogs for years. It is not too much to ask them to learn a second language. Harper did it. Why shouldn't the auditor general? Well-educated Europeans all speak several languages. Are we too dumb or too lazy to do the same?
When the Canadian Forces needs dentists, it hires people who have gone to the trouble to go to dental school. The federal public service should do the same, and stop spending so much money training unilingual people to learn another language.
The federal government won't say how much it costs, but there are about 30 language schools in Ottawa and they charge up to $100,000 a year per student.
A lot of them do a bad job, which is good for business, because the longer the student stays in school, the more money the school makes.
Because many anglophones are only learning so that they can qualify for a promotion, many of them are bad students. They often stop practising after they pass the test.
The government wastes money training people who are about to retire, and some managers send troublesome employees on French training to get them out of the workplace.
Because of language requirements, francophones make up 31.5 per cent of executives in the public service although they make up only 22.3 per cent of the population.
Visible minorities and westerners are under-represented, which means the people running the country are too focused on the concerns of the bilingual belt — from Sault Ste. Marie to Moncton — and not enough on British Columbia, where more people speak Chinese, Punjabi and German than French.
With a Western-led government, it is a good time to — very carefully — rethink the bilingualism industry and stop spending so much on so little.
The good news is that the federal government is now able to hire people who are already bilingual.
The first French immersion schools in Canada opened in Toronto in 1962. The immersion kids are now moving into management positions in the federal government. We should require them to be bilingual, but stop teaching French to baby boomers.
And we should re-examine the language requirements. Right now, managers must score well on challenging oral exams to keep their jobs.
In the workplace, though, a functional bilingualism is de rigueur, with francophones speaking and emailing in French and Anglophones speaking and emailing in English, communicating without a lot of fuss.
Everyone should be able to express themselves in their own language, understand their coworkers and focus on doing the people's work, which is supposed to their raison d'etre.
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Source: Ottawa Citizen
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