Refer to the Appendix of this directive.
The deputy head or their delegate is responsible for the following:
The deputy head or their delegated office manager is responsible for the following:
Ensuring that any office subject to a provision of the Regulations that provides for the delivery of bilingual services implements the measures needed to fulfill its language obligations as soon as possible. The office has a maximum of one year to do so from the date on which its language designation was determined or from the date on which the thresholds set by the Regulations were reached, as appropriate;The deputy head or their delegate is responsible for the following:
The deputy head or their delegate is responsible for the following:
Evaluation of the implementation of the above requirements is conducted using performance measurement tools identified by the Office of the Chief Human Resources Officer within the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat.
The deputy head or their delegate is responsible for:
The consequences of non-compliance with this directive are listed in the Policy on Official Languages, section 7: Consequences.
This section identifies the roles of other key government organizations in relation to this directive. In and of itself, this section does not confer any authority.
Please direct all requests for information about this directive to the person responsible for official languages in your institution.
A regulatory provision (subsection 5(3.1) of the Regulations) that aims to mitigate the impact of certain demographic changes so as to ensure that an office retains its existing bilingual designation when the official language minority population referred to in the applied regulatory provision has remained the same or increased in number, even if the minority population has decreased as a percentage of the total population.
This provision applies to bilingual offices that would have become unilingual based on the update of the language designations of offices under one of the following provisions: paragraph 5(1)(b), (c), (g), (h), (i), (j), (l), (m), (o), (p), and (q) of the Regulations.
This provision does not apply to offices that measured demand based on the previous census or the census in force, or to offices that have a bilingual designation based on the presence of a minority language primary or secondary public educational facility in their service area.
Federal services listed in the Regulations that are subject to specific provisions.
Within a census metropolitan area, key services are services provided by a Service Canada Centre, a passport point of service, a post office, an office of the Business Development Bank of Canada, an office of the Canada Revenue Agency, an office of Canadian Heritage, an office of the Public Service Commission of Canada, and a regional economic development agency.
Within a census subdivision, key services are the services listed above, as well as services provided by Royal Canadian Mounted Police detachments.
A primary or secondary school of the English or French linguistic minority that is publicly funded. These are facilities established to respect the constitutional right provided for in paragraph 23(3)(b) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. This definition excludes universities, immersion schools, private facilities, and adult education.
Any location where a federal institution provides services or information to the public. It can be a post office; a border port of entry; an information counter; a toll-free service number; a train, boat or plane route; or a national park or historic site.
Principle taken from the Regulations according to which a federal institution with several offices in a given census metropolitan area (CMA) or a census subdivision (CSD) must provide services in both official languages in a number of offices that is equal to or greater than the proportion of the population represented by the minority compared to the total population in the CMA or CSD.
The following provisions of the Regulations concern the principle of proportionality: paragraphs 5(1)(b), (c), (g), (i), (m) and (p).
The Regulations provide that the following factors must be considered when deciding which offices will be required to provide communications and services in both official languages:
Example of the application of the principle of proportionality
Fictional CMA
Total population: 147,655
Minority population: 41,850
Percentage: 28.3
Almost 90% of the French-speaking population of the CMA is found in three of the seven localities that make up the CMA: 48% of the French-speaking population lives in the principal city, 22% in locality A and 20% in locality B.
Under the principle of proportionality, if 10 of the institution’s offices in a CMA provide the same services, the number of these offices that must provide their services in both official languages should be calculated as follows: 10 × 28.3% = 2.8, or 3 offices.
When the application of proportionality results in a fraction (for example, 2.8) rather than a whole number, the fraction must be rounded up to the nearest whole number. The regulatory provision requires that the number of an institution’s offices providing services in both official languages compared to the total number of offices it has in a given region must be equal to or greater than the proportion of the minority population compared to the total population in the region. (If the result was 2.3 or 2.5 out of 10, the number of offices would still be 3.)
Since a high proportion of the minority population lives outside the principal city, it would be inappropriate to designate three offices in that city as bilingual offices.
It might be more appropriate to provide services in both official languages at two offices in the principal city and at one in either locality A or B, or to provide services in both official languages at one office in each of the three localities.
The final decision will also have to consider the mandate of the office and the results of the consultation with the minority population served by these offices.
When the principle of proportionality is applied in a CSD instead of a CMA, the number and location of offices required to provide services in both official languages are determined in the same way.
Area determined by federal institutions based on their office networks and on the regions and clienteles served by these offices. A service area generally corresponds to a given geographical perimeter within which an office provides its services to and communicates with the public. The service area may extend beyond the boundaries of the census metropolitan area (CMA) or census subdivision (CSD) where the office is located. Beyond the defined service area, communications with and services to the public are provided by another office of the same institution.