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New report shows that Ontario government failed to meet its obligations under the FLSA
French Language Services Commissioner Carl Bouchard released on 12 July 2024 a report urging the Ontario government to make all of its out-of-home advertising bilingual, after his latest investigation found it systematically failed to meet its obligations under the French Language Services Act (FLSA) – even when communicating important public health information.
The investigation, led by the French Language Services Unit of the Office of the Ombudsman, examined 17 advertising campaigns by or on behalf of the Ministry of Health between April 1, 2020 and March 31, 2023 – a period when many messages were about the COVID-19 pandemic. Only three of these campaigns included any out-of-home advertising in French.
“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,” the Commissioner writes in the report, entitled Missed Messages.
To promote systematic compliance with the French Language Services Act, such messages "should be delivered in English and French across the entire province," he says.
Out-of-home government advertising – e.g., billboards, electronic panels, signs on public transit – is a “service to the public” for the purposes of the FLSA, the Commissioner explains. “Unfortunately, our investigation found that not only were the obligations established by the French Language Services Act not met in any of the campaigns we reviewed, very few people involved with the development of the campaigns were even aware of them,” he says.
The investigation was launched by Commissioner Bouchard on his own initiative in light of the French Language Services Unit’s observations of unilingual ads in public places, and trends in cases received over the years. The investigation reviewed the process of developing government advertising campaigns, which is centralized in Cabinet Office.
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Source: Ombudsman Ontario, Canada
