Canada's Language Rights Investigation

(Ottawa, Canada) Canadian law requires all airline travelers be provided services in both the English and French languages. Canada's language police is being dispatched to verify compliance.

Official Languages Commissioner Graham Fraser says his office will conduct more than 1,500 anonymous observations this fall at airports in Halifax, Quebec City, Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, Winnipeg, Edmonton and Vancouver.

He says audits of some of those airports have been done in the past, but this will be the first time so many are done at once.

“I’ve been interested in the language rights of the travelling public really throughout my mandate,” Fraser said Wednesday.

“So at different times, we’ve been looking at different aspects of what the traveller’s experience is. We’ve looked at border services, we’ve done an audit of Air Canada’s service to the public, and now we’re looking at airports.”

Arguably, the effort is just another bureaucratic make-work ploy with actual costs far exceeding any perceived benefits.