Canada. Bilingual Districts Advisory Board (1972) : The legislative basis for the Bilingual Districts Advisory Boards is the Official Languages Act, 1969 (S C 1968-69, c 54, s 12-18). As conceived under this legislation, a Board would be constituted once every ten years and operate as an ad hoc Board of Inquiry under the Inquiries Act in order to make recommendations about the designation of the Bilingual districts on which basis federal offices would be expected to provide bilingual services. Each board was to operate as an independent Board of Inquiry under Part 1 of the Inquiries Act and the Board would disband upon presenting its report to the Governor in Council. Thus while the only two boards ever constituted succeeded immediately one after the other, 1970-1971 and 1972-1975, while the terms of reference for both were defined by a single legislative Act and while the two Advisory Boards were tied together by a single continuing secretariat which served them both; by virtue of their separate appointment under the provisions of the Inquiries Act, they constituted two separate entities.
The original proposal for bilingual districts arose from the recommendations of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism (1963-1970) which had adapted the idea from Finnish practice. As orginally conceived, bilingual districts would provide the framework in which the federal government would develop its program to provide bilingual services to linguistic minorities throughout Canada but as well they would delineate areas where provincial and municipal governments would also extend the principle organically in each such district beyond strict federal jurisdiction. The federal legislation could only mandate the districts for purposes of federal jurisdiction. The function of the Bilingual Districts Advisory Board was limited to recommending the actual boundaries of the proposed districts based on the decennial census and the provisions in the Act which specified that, to qualify as a bilingual district, at least ten per cent of the population must be composed of an official language minority or federal offices in the area must have provided bilingual service customarily in the past.
An Advisory Board of not less than 5 persons nor more than 10 persons was to be organized as soon as possible after each decennial census. It was to make recomendations based on census statistics for the proclamation and delineation of bilingual districts. With the support of the Chief Statistician and the Director of Surveys and Mapping Branch of the Department of Energy, Mines and Resources and after holding whatever public meeting and consultations with provincial governments that it thought necessary, the Advisory Board then submitted its report and recommendations to the Governor in Council and disbanded.
The Second Board was established by Order in Council on 25 May 1972 (PC 1972-1125) less than a year after the first Board submitted its report. Paul Fox, a Toronto academic, served as the Chairperson. The report of this Board was published in 1975. Once again the set of recommendations put forward by the Board were not adopted. By this time, it had become generally evident that the organic bilingualism conceived on the district model by the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism was not a preferable or even a viable method of administering the principles of the Official Languages Act. Beginning with a Parliamentary Declaration in 1973 reaffirming the principles of bilingualism throughout the Government of Canada and all its agencies, the emphasis in implementing the principles of the Official Languages Act shifted from the notion of guarantees of service to minorities on a territorial basis to much more complex institutions of language of work, service to the public, and equitable representation applied through complex conventions on the principle of "significant demand" (Section 9(2) of the Official Languages Act) and other provisions of the Act. After a detailed review, the government formally decided not to proceed with the establishment of federal bilingual districts in large part because the territorial approach to the provision of bilingual services proved too cumbersome to cope with the widely divergent geo-demographic patterns characteristic of official language populations in Canada and because such an approach would have essentially left the provision of minority language services in major urban areas outside Quebec and Ottawa without adequate support while not extending the guaranttee of service to any area where bilingual service was not already available. The basis for a Bilingual Districts Advisory Board was effectively terminated under Treasury Board decision Treasury Board Circular No. 1977-46 (page 12), although the sections of the Official Languages Act providing for the Boards remained in the consolidated Statutes of Canada until assent was given to the revised Official Languages Act on 28 July 1988. No third board was ever appointed. The administration of Official Languages Policy in the federal public sector does continue to operate on the basis of a sliding scale of service in relation to demand which in turn creates a de facto territorial basis for the administration of the Act but this territorial dimension does not constitute official bilingual districts and is entirely flexible in relation to future demand.
