Canadian taxpayers are spending $2.4 billion on providing bilingual services each year, according to a new report from the Fraser Institute.
Of that, the provinces are spending $900 million, while the federal government used $1.5 billion to ensure Canadians could access services in either French or English.
The numbers suggest each Canadian pays $85 to ensure the country’s language laws are upheld.
Meantime, rates of bilingualism in Canada have been climbing over the past 20 years, with 17.4 per cent of the Canadian population reporting they could speak in both English and French in the 2006 census.
Between 1951 and 1996 the number of people reporting they were bilingual doubled from 1.7 million to 4.8 million.
The rates are carried by Quebec where the number of bilingual residents bumps up the national average.
Bilingual services still necessary: expert
But until the entire population can speak both French and English, governments will be forced to continue to provide services in both languages.
According to the Fraser Report, it is costing the government less than one per cent of GDP. Health care spending by comparison was 11.7 per cent of GDP in 2010.
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“If everyone were bilingual the costs might be lesser,” said Michel Doucet, a University of Moncton constitutional law professor and expert in language rights. “But that ideal society does not exist in Canada or anywhere else really.”
Canada’s Official Languages Act protects the right of all Canadians to receive services from the federal government in both official languages. Some provinces including Manitoba, New Brunswick, Ontario and Quebec, have additional laws to protect language rights.
Language rights are further enshrined in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, where minority education rights allow citizens whose first language is the minority official language in the province where they reside to have their children educated in that language.
The report suggests that most of the money was used to fund minority language education. It report based its numbers off of the public accounts or annual reports of provincial governments. The authors state they only took into account the additional costs of providing education in the minority language.
Other sources of spending included printing bilingual forms and purchasing bilingual advertisements.
Weighing costs vs. benefits of bilingualism
Doucet said the Fraser Institute’s report misses an important piece of bilingualism’s cost-benefit analysis.
“There is no notion of costs on the social and political benefit that Canada feels it is getting out of bilingualism,” he said of the report. “We as a country have decided that bilingualism is a fundamental part of what defines us as a country.”
While he wasn’t available for comment on Monday, Université de Montréal economics professor and co-author of the study François Vaillancourt said in a statement, the report wasn’t about judging the value of funding bilingualism.
“The issue we examine in this study is not whether bilingualism is good or bad policy, but the costs above and beyond that of providing education and other services in the majority language,” he said in a statement.
The right-leaning think-tank suggested provinces with large francophone populations, such as Ontario, contract out languages services to the private sector on a user-pay basis.
Doucet said privatizing services may be appropriate in some instances, but at the end of the day it is governments who should pay for the services.
“At the end of the day, the obligations are not imposed on citizens. They are imposed on the state,” he said
Bilingual services spending by province
Ontario had the biggest budget for bilingual services at $623 million annually. Canada’s most populous province also has a large francophone minority.
New Brunswick followed, spending $85 million and Quebec spent $50 million.
Of the remaining provinces Alberta spent $33 million, B.C. spent $23 million, Nova Scotia spent $18 million, Manitoba spent $16 million, Saskatchewan spent $9.65 million, Prince Edward Island spent $5.1 million and Newfoundland and Labrador spent $3.4 million.
The news comes just two days after some 190 second-language instructors at the Canada School of the Public Service learned the federal government is cutting their jobs. The instructors offered training for public servants.
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