this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2024
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Unable to work in their official language of choice, some public servants are quitting — to Canada’s detriment (theconversation.com)
submitted 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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The study that is mentioned: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/382073071_Linguistic_Diversity_and_Public_Servants'_Turnover_Intentions_Theory_and_Analysis_from_a_Multilingual_State

But not all is well at the moment with Canada’s federal public service. In a forthcoming study to be published in the Review of Public Personnel Administration, my co-researcher and I find that the inability of both French and English-speaking federal public servants to work in their official language of choice is pushing them to consider quitting their jobs.

Approximately 40 per cent of English and French-speaking public servants, citing a low ability to use their official language at work, said they intended to quit their jobs for something else within the public service, whereas the probability of quitting was only 26 per cent among public servants expressing a high ability to use their official language at work.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (5 children)

The study that is mentioned: (researchgate.net)

But not all is well at the moment with Canada’s federal public service. In a forthcoming study to be published in the Review of Public Personnel Administration, my co-researcher and I find that the inability of both French and English-speaking federal public servants to work in their official language of choice is pushing them to consider quitting their jobs.

Approximately 40 per cent of English and French-speaking public servants, citing a low ability to use their official language at work, said they intended to quit their jobs for something else within the public service, whereas the probability of quitting was only 26 per cent among public servants expressing a high ability to use their official language at work.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 months ago (4 children)

This is mind boggling to me. Everyone I've met in the PS with any kind of supervisory role has known at least enough French to carry a conversation. And all managers need to be CCC. How is anybody ending up in a position where they can't use their preferred official language?

[–] Grabthar 5 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Didn't join the site to download the pdf, but it looks like it is trying to find a correlation between wanting to leave the public service and answering a survey question about how often you can use your preferred language. As such, I am not sure if they have any follow up queations on why people answered what they did in the survey, but it could be as simple as they have to interact with unilingual people. Even if they have a bilingual boss (who, even at CCC may not be very good), they may not have bilingual clients or team mates and therefore have to work in one language most of the time.

IT in particular can be tricky, since most things are only English. A lot of software tools only come in English, and a big chunk of vendor support is from the US and often does not have a French option. The contractor pool is also largely English since the Canadian private sector doesn't require bilingualism for tech workers.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago

Yes even if your supervisor is bilingual, it's still possible that your office has a dominant language by virtue of the majority.

But anyone who works in IT knows that the price of entry is knowing a certain amount of English, so I would be surprised that IT workers are the ones complaining. They wouldn't have completed whatever postsecondary taught them IT without learning the basics in English. It's baked into the industry. Like how biologists need to learn Latin names.

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