MACLEOD: If you only speak English — Ottawa isn’t hiring you

Colin MacLeod is the author of the provocative book “The Case for Alberta’s Independence,” and the force behind @cnm5000 on X.Let's be honest about something that doesn't get talked about enough. If you're an Albertan who only speaks English, the federal government in Ottawa is largely closed to you. Not because you're not smart enough, not because you don't have the experience, but because of a language requirement that most of us were never in a position to meet growing up here.About 40% of all federal public servants work in the Ottawa-Gatineau area — that's Ottawa on the Ontario side and Gatineau sitting right across the river in Quebec. That's where the real work happens. The Privy Council Office, Treasury Board, Finance, Justice, Global Affairs — all of it headquartered in a functionally bilingual region, where French isn't just tolerated, it's expected. If you want to work at that level, you need to operate comfortably in both languages. Full stop.And we're not just talking about front-line jobs. The people who actually shape policy — the analysts writing briefing notes for ministers, the directors deciding which options even make it to the table, the deputy ministers advising cabinet, those are the positions that run the country day to day. Every single one of them requires mandatory bilingual proficiency.The federal government even grades its language requirements. Senior executive positions are classified CBC or CCC — meaning you need to read, write, and speak both official languages at a high level. A Calgary engineer who spent 30 years in the energy sector and knows more about Western Canadian resource policy than anyone in the building cannot be appointed to run that file in Ottawa without passing French-language tests. Doesn't matter how good they are.The Clerk of the Privy Council, the top public servant in Canada, has to be bilingual. So do deputy ministers, associate deputy ministers, the heads of major Crown corporations, and the Governor General. There's no workaround, no grandfather clause, no "we'll make an exception for the right candidate.”.It goes further than most people realize. Since 2021, every new Supreme Court justice must be functionally bilingual at the time of appointment, able to read cases and hear arguments in both languages without a translator. Regardless of the excellent transcription services technology can provide today. Moreover, 3 of the 9 Supreme Court Justices must be from Quebec. That's the law. So if you're an Alberta judge with an outstanding record on the bench, a career's worth of hard-won expertise, but your French isn't there, you're done. You won't sit on the Supreme Court of Canada. The country's highest court has been effectively narrowed to candidates from the bilingual corridor.Only about two to three percent of Albertans grew up speaking French at home. French immersion has helped, but there's a big difference between finishing high school with conversational French and being able to chair a federal policy meeting or argue a constitutional case in the language. The kind of fluency that opens doors in Ottawa generally comes from living in it — growing up in Montreal, working in Gatineau, spending years immersed. That's just not the experience most of us have here.Someone from Ottawa or Montreal arrives at a federal job competition already fluent. They didn't work for it any more than we worked for speaking English; it's just where they grew up. But that accident of geography gives them a structural advantage that follows them throughout their careers.Picture someone from Edmonton: sharp, ambitious, gets into the federal public service through a competitive process, does good work. She wants to move up into the Privy Council Office, where the real action is. The posting requires bilingual proficiency. She signs up for government language training, but becoming genuinely fluent as an adult under the pressure of a career clock ticking is hard. Years go by. People from Quebec and bilingual Ontario step into those roles while she's still in the classroom. She tops out before she ever gets near the table where decisions are made.Or think about a veteran oil and gas executive: someone who genuinely understands energy transition, who knows the Alberta side of the equation inside and out. Ottawa wants that kind of expertise. But the appointment process has language expectations. Someone with less relevant knowledge but stronger French ends up with the file. This isn't unusual. It happens constantly..Here's the part that should concern everyone. When the people writing Canada's energy policy, calculating equalization transfers, and designing environmental regulations are drawn almost entirely from central Canada's bilingual world, Alberta's perspective doesn't arrive in Ottawa on its own terms. It gets filtered through people who didn't live it. The instincts are off. The blind spots are real.The rules systematically favour one part of the country over another, year after year, appointment after appointment.A unilingual Albertan, no matter how talented or experienced, runs into a ceiling in the federal government that bilingual Canadians simply don't face. The senior policy jobs, the central agencies, and the Supreme Court; these are not realistically accessible to most of us. We contribute an enormous share of federal revenues and, in return, ask for a fair voice in how this country is run. The language wall makes that nearly impossible. That's not a small thing. And for a growing number of Albertans, it's one more reason to seriously question whether this arrangement is actually working for us.Colin MacLeod is the author of the provocative book “The Case for Alberta’s Independence,” and the force behind @cnm5000 on X.

MACLEOD: If you only speak English — Ottawa isn’t hiring you

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