The New Brunswick government’s proposed amendments to the Official Languages Act are being met with backlash from opposition parties and the Acadian Association.
The changes would include creating a secretariat of official languages that would update the act continuously rather than a mandatory review every 10 years.
“Rather than become a big event that creates a lot of anxiety at the time let’s have an ongoing ability to address shortcomings and allow us to have a meaningful dialogue,” Premier Blaine Higgs told reporters on Wednesday.
The Act can be updated outside of the 10-year review currently.
Higgs said he was hoping the bill would be passed in “early April.”
“It should pass easy enough,” he said.
Liberal MLA Benoît Bourque told reporters he finds the removal of the 10-year review obligation “appalling.”
“It goes against the rights of the minority,” he said. “The fox is saying ‘I can take care of the henhouse, and I don’t need to be accountable, I’ll be fine, please trust me,'” he said.
Green MLA Kevin Arseneau said this was another example of Premier Higgs’ tumultuous relationship with francophones.
“It’s just a way basically of taking away all pressure from him and from future premiers in not having that responsibility to bring changes. What the review would do is bring the subject to the forefront, bring political debate on it,” Arseneau said in scrums.
Arseneau said there was “no consultation” in “any way shape or form” from the government on this bill, and said he will not support it.
The province has had the obligation to review the Act every 10 years since 2002.
In a press release, the province said the changes were coming in response to a report on a review of the Official Languages Act authored by Judge Yvette Finn and John McLaughlin in late 2021.
That report recommended that a review be undertaken every five years rather than every 10.
Other proposed amendments in the bill were to “add a mechanism permitting the commissioner of official languages to delegate the power to investigate in the event of a conflict of interest,” according to the release.
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None of the recommendations in the 40-page report from Finn and McLaughlin were adopted.
The president of the Acadian Association of New Brunswick said the bill is a step backward for the Acadian people.
“We are seeing the federal government who would like to see a reverse in the decline of the French language,” SANB president Alexandre Cédric Doucet said on Wednesday.
“The only bilingual province isn’t doing anything for the French language,” he said.
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