Canada. Bilingual Districts Advisory Board (1970) : The legislative basis for the Bilingual Districts Advisory Boards is the Official Languages Act of 1969 (S C 1968-69, c 54, s 12-18). As conceived under this legislation, a Board would be constituted once every ten years and operate as an ad hoc Board of Inquiry under the Inquiries Act in order to make recommendations about the designation of the Bilingual districts on which basis federal offices would be expected to provide bilingual services. Each board was to operate as an independent Board of Inquiry under Part 1 of the Inquiries Act and the Board would disband upon presenting its report to the Governor in Council. Thus while the only two boards ever constituted succeeded immediately one after the other, 1970-1971 and 1972-1975, while the terms of reference for both were defined by a single legislative Act and while the two Advisory Boards were tied together by a single continuing secretariat which served them both; by virtue of their separate appointment under the provisions of the Inquiries Act, they constituted two separate entities.
The original proposal for bilingual districts arose from the recommendations of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism (1963-1970) which had adopted the idea from Finnish practice. As orginally conceived, bilingual districts would provide the framework in which the federal government would develop its program to provide bilingual services to linguistic minorities throughout Canada but as well they would delineate areas where provincial and municipal governments would also extend the principle organically in each such district beyond strict federal jurisdiction. The federal legislation could only mandate the districts for purposes of federal jurisdiction. The function of the Bilingual Districts Advisory Board was limited to recommending the actual boundaries of the proposed districts based on the decennial census and the provisions in the Act which specified that, to qualify as a bilingual district, at least ten per cent of the population must be composed of an official language minority or federal offices in the area must have provided bilingual service customarily in the past.
An Advisory Board of not less than five persons nor more than ten persons was to be organized as soon as possible after each decennial census. It was to make recomendations based on census statistics for the proclamation and delineation of bilingual districts. With the support of the Chief Statistician and the Director of Surveys and Mapping Branch of the Department of Energy, Mines and Resources and after holding whatever public meeting and consultations with provincial governments that it thought necessary, the Advisory Board then submitted its report and recommendations to the Governor in Council and disbanded.
The First Board was established on 12 February 1970 (PC 1970-294) one year before the decennial census, with Roger Duhamel serving as the Chairperson. The report of this Board was published in May 1971. The timing of the Board relative to the decennial census meant that the recommendations could only be interim in nature. On the basis of the statutory criteria spelled out in the Official Languages Act, the First Board recommended 37 bilingual districts and possibly 24 others to be determined after the results of the 1971 census were complete. Incorporated into the recommendations was the proposal that the entire province of Quebec be designated a single bilingual district. The recommendations of this First Board were compromised by several factors. In the first place, there was widespread public antipathy to and confusion about the application of the concept, both among large sectors of the Anglophone majority outside Quebec and the Francophone majority within Quebec. In the second place, the need and utility of formal bilingual districts as the mechanism to ensure the principle of linguistic equality and federal service to linguistic minorities was itself coming under question both among informed supporters of the Official Languages Program and those policy administrators charged with implementing the broader program of bilingualism within the federal public service. In the third place, the proposal to make all of Quebec a single federal bilingual district was completely out of step with the concerns of the Francophone majority in Quebec to expand the use of French as the working language within provincial jurisdiction through prescriptive language legislation; for many in Quebec the report of the First Bilingual Districts Advisory Board was perceived as a double national standard that further diminished the status of the linguistic majority in Quebec. With no consensus possible and a new census in the process of completion, the government of the day decided not to implement the recommendations of the Board but instead to appoint a new Board to reconsider the whole question in light of the new statistics. This new Board constitutes the [Second] Bilingual Districts Advisory Board.
