Active offer

Active offer is the guarantee of the quality of government services offered to the public. For patients navigating the health care system, active offer is synonymous with safety. In May 2016, after nearly a decade of promoting active offer and working upstream with government ministries and agencies, the Commissioner published his Special Report — Active Offer of Services in French: The Cornerstone for Achieving the Objectives of Ontario’s French Language Services Act.⁷⁵

The Commissioner welcomed the efforts of agencies that have tackled the principle of active offer head-on, making them champions of promoting and implementing active offer. He also recognized the greater commitment on the part of the government and the steps it has taken in the right direction to address active offer in recent years. However, the Commissioner has heard nothing from the government regarding the recommendations in his special report on active offer.

The challenges still exist in 2017, including agency employees’ lacking the language capacity to provide services on behalf of the government in French. The Commissioner continues to deplore the continuing lack of human resources planning to take designated positions into account. Even worse, the lack of accountability in this regard distances agency managers from the impact on individuals who are not proactively offered services in French. As has been repeatedly pointed out, that impact can have serious and even tragic consequences, depending on how urgently a service is needed in French.

The public is not always informed of the existence of French-language services or of their right to obtain those services, and the Commissioner sees this as the cornerstone of a revision of the French Language Services Act. The Act is silent on the principle of active offer. While it gives Francophones the right to use French when they deal with the government, it says nothing about their right to be informed of the possibility of obtaining those services in French.

In 2017, over 30 years after the Act was enacted, the services available in French in Ontario have not met the objectives in the Act, even in designated areas. Time is passing and progress is slow. The Commissioner urges the government to act on his special report on active offer and initiate the process of revising the French Language Services Act once and for all.

Recommendation 8

The Commissioner recommends that the Minister Responsible for Francophone Affairs act on his 2016 special report on active offer with the aim of initiating, by the spring of 2018, a process of amending the French Language Services Act to include a provision or provisions relating to the obligation of active offer, including a definition of the concept.

75. For further details, see https://csfontario.ca/en/articles/5798#_Toc451428093 (page accessed in April 2017).