Liberals Stage Protest Over Unilingual Auditor-General

And yet another riveting chapter in the war over bilingualism leads to symbolic gestures with next to no actual impact.

Interim Liberal leader Bob Rae staged a protest this morning over the appointment of Michael Ferguson to the position of auditor general, saying that his party will refuse to accept a unilingual person as the chief government watchdog. Ferguson, who had been auditor-general of New Brunswick, the country's only officially bilingual province, had been picked by Prime Minister Stephen Harper to succeed Sheila Fraser, whose term ended earlier this year. But the revelation that Ferguson isn't fluent in French has both the NDP, the Liberals, and the Bloc Québécois in a tizzy, leading to all sorts of political theatrics that, while entertaining, will do nothing to stop the Tories from voting Ferguson in. So this morning, in a show of protest, Rae and the (tiny) Liberal caucus refused to convene in the House of Commons just as the parties were getting set to vote. Rae called Ferguson's appointment a "complete abuse of process" over his lack of French (even if Ferguson says he plans to learn the language within the first year of his 10-year mandate). The NDP has chosen to pursue the marginally more effective route of filing a complaint with the country's language commissioner.