French language services commissioner calls on government to ensure ads in public spaces are bilingual (The Trillium)

Sneh Duggal
July 12, 2024
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The province's French language services commissioner is calling on the government to ensure all of its advertising in public spaces is bilingual after he found that few ad campaigns during the COVID-19 pandemic included any out-of-home advertising in French.

"Cabinet Office and the other two ministries are systematically failing to fulfill their obligations under the French Language Services Act when they communicate only in English in public places through out-of-home advertising – and ultimately, it is all those who speak French who miss out on this information from the Ontario government," Carl Bouchard said at Queen's Park on Friday morning, referring to the Ministries of Health and Francophone Affairs.

Bouchard held a press conference at the Pink Palace to release a report following an investigation he launched last year into the government's out-of-home advertising, which includes billboards and signs on public transit.

"The French Language Services Act gives francophones the right to expect communication in French from provincial government agencies. This contradiction between what the act says and the government's practice led me to launch, on my own initiative, an investigation to assess how the government takes the French Language Services Act into account when it communicates with Ontarians in public places," Bouchard said in French.

The investigation examined the government's process of developing ad campaigns — something that is centralized in Cabinet Office, the ministry that supports the premier and cabinet. It focused on 17 health-related ad campaigns between April 1, 2020 and March 31, 2023. The team found that just three of these had French out-of-home ads.

“The result was that the majority of messages in public spaces about issues of critical importance for Ontarians over three years of COVID-19 – including information about how to stay safe and healthy during the crisis – were in English only, leaving francophones without access to information critical to their health,” Bouchard wrote in his "Missed Messages" report.

For example, the government's "Stop the Spread" campaign that encouraged people to mask, wash their hands and maintain social distancing and ran in January 2021 only included English ads in public places, the report stated.

It was the same for a campaign that ran later that year focusing on colon cancer screening.

Through the investigation, Bouchard said he found the government's obligations under the French Language Services Act were not considered during the process to develop ad campaigns and that few involved knew about the government's Communications in French Directive and Guidelines.

Developed in 2010, the directive outlines the requirement of ministries and agencies to "offer communication services in French equivalent to those offered in English, at the same time and of the same quality," while the guidelines give "specific instructions for the different types of government communications with Francophone populations and lay out certain practices."

Bouchard's report said the few people involved in the ad-making process who knew about these documents said they don't "clarify or specify how out-of-home advertising should be communicated in French in order to comply with the Act."

"Instead, Cabinet Office follows an 'unwritten rule' that 5 per cent of each advertising campaign budget be spent on advertisements in French, but this can include platforms other than out-of-home advertising – and in many cases, out-of-home ads are not used to reach francophones at all," the commissioner's office stated.

He issued seven recommendations including that "Cabinet Office use a bilingual format for all out-of-home government advertising so that government communications are issued in both English and French at the same time" and that the Francophone Affairs ministry and Cabinet Office "incorporate specific standards for out-of-home advertising" into the Communications in French Directive and Guidelines.

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