Languages czar: More power needed to force Air Canada to respect law

Air Canada consistently flouts the Official Languages Act and Parliament must do more to pressure the company to comply with the rules, Canada’s official languages commissioner said Tuesday. As he tabled a special report on the airline in the Commons, Graham Fraser said his office doesn’t have enough power to force it to offer more French-language services. “My predecessors and I have used all of the tools at our disposal in order to help Air Canada improve its compliance to the act,” he said. “However, after 45 years, the same issues continue to repeat themselves.” He said his office continues to receive complaints about unilingual anglophone employees on Air Canada flights between Montreal and northern Quebec and beefs regarding employees who refuse to get French-speaking agents to help francophone travellers. Fraser said what turns an unhappy passenger into a complainant is the contempt the airline’s employees allegedly show toward people who ask for service in French. Fraser’s report is specifically about the airline, which under federal law is obligated to provide French-language services. Air Canada said Fraser’s report was unjustified as the number of complaints against the company has remained stable at around 50 a year. “The commissioner’s contention that there is an exceptional, systemic problem of non-compliance by Air Canada … has been rejected by both the Federal Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court of Canada,” the airline said. “Punitive measures aimed at Air Canada as suggested by this report are without credible justification, misdirected and would not contribute to promoting bilingualism in Canada or improving the level of services in both official languages available to Canadian travellers.”<br/>