Sacred Cows

"It's really developed to the point where I don't know how we would be able to keep tabs on who's getting training and how much it costs.  It's just hard to quantify."
Nelson Kalil, spokesperson for commissioner of official languages, Graham Fraser

 "We have never covered this in How Ottawa Spends"
Bruce Doern, co-editor of How Ottawa Spends, annual in-depth assessment of federal government spending

 "We would have no way of knowing that.  We have some numbers on bilingual positions, unilingual positions, things like that.  But nothing on language training."
Annie Trepanier, spokesperson for the Public Service Commission

 No idea.  Perhaps, on the other hand, some idea, some theories, but no collected hard facts and figures.  Difficult to ascertain because the topic is politically inconvenient.  Parliamentary Budget Officer Kevin Page, famous for his insistence that government come clean on all manner of spending for various programs and government offices, was unable to offer a reliable figure.

Nor does Auditor General Michael Ferguson have any idea.  Perhaps there's an area of public tax funding that he should focus on in the near future?  We should know, shouldn't we?  Other than to hazard guesses?  The Public Service Modernization Act which decentralized language training might be cited as one reason, since all government departments are uniquely responsible for their own language training issues.

On the other hand, Kevin Page has just recently issued demands to all government departments that he wishes each of them to respond to his needs to put together collected data from all of them to enable him to arrive at facts and figures that he feels are important in judging government performance and its costs.

Treasury Board claims that each government department and agency is notionally responsible for maintaining their own records so they may be reported to the Office of the Chief Human Resources officer on request.  Might we then assume that such requests are few and far between?  Since Daniel Watson, the chief Human Resources officer himself is not in possession of those recoverable records.

Total federal government education and training spending of about $470 million was established, out of which came over $57 million paid to language schools providing the required training.  But the $57 million doesn't quite represent the full cost of language training since Public Accounts list only individual payments of $100,000 or over. 

More than $195-million in education and training expenses last year were under that benchmark figure.  An additional $21 million was listed by 2012 Public Accounts for education and training payments to universities and colleges providing language training.  The government spent $40.5 million in 2011-12 for costs over $25,000 mostly for National Defence.

Then, of course, there is worker salaries paid while on training courses.  Add to that the salaries of temporary replacement workers doing the jobs of those on training courses.  An unofficial estimate listed an all-in annual cost of language training between $1 billion and $2 billion representing roughly 3% of the federal government's annual personnel costs of $44-billion.

Treasury Board figures 41% of all government positions in core public administration were bilingual; over 83,000 positions.  Higher in the National Capital region where two thirds of positions are designated bilingual, representing about 59,000 of the region's 88,801 core public service jobs.

Is all of that money well spent?  Remember: that's just language training, it doesn't include the costs of translation services, of printed and publishing all government documents in both official languages, and other bilingual costs rather too numerous to name.  And the gain to Canada?

Just asking.