Kelly Burke, a seasoned Ontario bureaucrat, has just been named Canada’s new official languages commissioner. She has a big job ahead of her, and anyone familiar with the language file can only wish her well.

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Burke is a lawyer by training and this will help her in administering the Official Languages Act. At the same time, career civil servants tend to have reflexes that are sometimes at odds with the need to push the government hard when rights are being denied or suppressed.

Mulcair: The trouble with Canada's new language-rights watchdog Back to video

Civil servants are good at navigating, ingratiating and going along. They’re not very good at standing up to governments on key issues. That’s why the commissioner has always had far greater autonomy than the deputy ministers and other mandarins that populate the office buildings in the nation’s capital. The commissioner has a bully pulpit that requires strength, knowledge, skill and courage.

The Liberals are a party of power. They know how to gain it. They know how to keep it. They don’t name “rock the boat” types to this kind of position. They want smooth sailing.

As Ontario’s former French language services commissioner, Burke is no doubt familiar with the real challenges of the minority francophone community of that province. I’m confident she’ll soon be up to speed on the issues facing the Acadian nation and francophones throughout Canada.

Unfortunately, for now, I see no evidence she has much of a grasp of the issues facing the English-speaking community of Quebec.

With Bill 96, the Coalition Avenir Québec government has made it virtually impossible to uphold the equality of English and French before the courts. After a 1985 Supreme Court ruling, I was hired by the government of Manitoba to oversee the translation of its statutes. Equality of French and English before the courts is now constitutionally protected there, as it is in Quebec. If a Conservative Manitoba government had tried to roll back that guarantee, the Liberal government in Ottawa would have been up in arms. In the case of English-language rights in Quebec, it closed its eyes.

Justin Trudeau’s government incorporated Bill 96 by reference into the new Official Languages Act. Will the new commissioner dare say anything about it?

Bonjour-Hi? OQLF gears up for new secret-shopper language check

A Montreal bakery is in the OQLF's crosshairs for its English TikToks

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I have worked on language issues for a good part of my career. After years in the legal department at the Conseil de la langue française, I went on to become director of legal affairs at Alliance Quebec. There I had the resources to bring together a team of experts to plead cases that gave rise to important jurisprudence on language rights. This involved bilingual-signs cases, of course, but also developing a working relationship with francophone groups outside Quebec and intervening to help them gain control and management of their school boards.

So when the newly minted language commissioner balked, during recent House of Commons testimony, at a straightforward question as to whether she’d defend the constitutional right of Quebec anglos to control and manage their own school boards, I was shocked. Burke seemed unaware of what the CAQ has been up to. With the benefit of “more time in the position,” she said, “I’d be happy to come back and contribute further to the conversation.”

Quebec’s English-speaking community is easy to dismiss when you’ve spent your career working with hard-pressed francophone minorities outside Quebec. I get it. We’ve built institutions here that are unrivalled by those of other linguistic minorities in Canada. But this is supposed to be about rights, not a race to the bottom.

We’ve just seen another one of those mind-boggling cases of a family business, a Montreal bakery, being targeted over social media posts that didn’t have the requisite amount of French, according to Quebec’s vocabulary constabulary. An official warning letter ensued!

It would be nice to have a federal official languages commissioner who could put up an articulate defence of the language rights of all linguistic minorities in Canada, but I’m not holding my breath.

Tom Mulcair, a former leader of the federal NDP, served as minister of the environment in the Quebec Liberal government of Jean Charest.

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