Should you sack your CEO if they can't speak French?

Right. Let's get this straight from the off. I am not here to tell you whether Michael Rousseau is a good CEO or a bad one. I have no idea whether he can land a plane, negotiate a fuel contract or make a half-decent quiche. What I can tell you is that the man stood in front of a camera - after two of his pilots had just been killed on a runway in New York - and delivered four excruciating minutes of condolence in English, bookended by the words "Bonjour" and "Merci.”

Now don’t get me wrong. My level of French is not stellar. I am the kind of francophone who can put together a semi pidgin question only to look hopelessly bemused when I get any form of reply. But I’m not him.

He is the Chief Executive of Canada's national airline, at least for a little while long given the news of his hastily announced retirement. He is headquartered in Montreal. His company is subject to the Official Languages Act. And in the time it takes to watch an episode of Arrested Development, he turned a national tragedy into a national catastrophe. About himself.

READ MORE: Air Canada CEO to step down after Francophone failure

By the morning of March 27th, the Office of the Commissioner of Official Languages had received over 2,000 complaints. Quebec's National Assembly passed a near-unanimous motion calling for his resignation. The Premier of Quebec called him out. The Prime Minister called him out. And a crisis communications expert noted, rather elegantly, that what should have been a textbook message of compassion devolved into two crises simultaneously: one of respect, and one of truth.

This, dear CHROs, is not a language problem. It is a board-level hiring failure five years in the making.

‘But he's been taking French lessons!’

Oh, has he? Three hundred hours of them, apparently, since he caused an almost identical storm back in 2021. Three. Hundred. Hours.

I once spent many hours trying to understand the suspension geometry of a Citroën DS. I still can't explain it, but I'd never agree to drive one in a Formula 1 race and then act surprised when it all went wrong.

Rousseau's previous problem was well-documented. In 2021, he gave a speech to a Montreal business audience almost entirely in English, then confessed to reporters that he'd lived in the city for 14 years without needing to speak French. He called this a "testament to the city of Montreal." The city, presumably, was not flattered.

So here's what happened. He said sorry. He took lessons. The board kept him on. And then, four years later - with 300 hours of tuition to his name and a crashed plane and two dead pilots requiring the most sensitive communication of his career - he produced two words of French.

Bonjour. Merci.

The crisis management expert Louis Aucoin put it perfectly: the man could simply have read a prepared statement in French. He had a speechwriter. He had a communications team. He had five years of advance warning. He chose not to.

That's not a language problem. That's a judgment problem. And judgment problems, friends, are your department.

The Legal Bit You Cannot Afford to Ignore

Now, I know what some of you are thinking. "We're a private company. The Official Languages Act is a government thing. It doesn't apply to us."

Partly true. Historically, the OLA didn't apply to the private sector. But in 2023, that changed. New federal legislation now imposes bilingualism obligations on federally regulated private businesses - including obligations around French as a language of both service and work - in Quebec and in regions with a significant francophone presence.

Air Canada, as a federally regulated carrier, is subject to the OLA in its entirety. Its own Official Languages Policy states that all communications with the public must be in both official languages. The Office of the Commissioner confirmed as much.

And from a people management standpoint, Canada's Treasury Board Directive is unambiguous: executive positions in bilingual regions require a superior level of proficiency in the second official language. For deputy ministers and equivalent roles - which explicitly includes Chief Executive Officers - bilingual imperative staffing is not optional. It is the law.

So the question isn't should your CEO speak French. The question is: why didn't you make sure they could before you handed them the keys?

This Is a Hiring Failure. Own It.

Here is what absolutely nobody in the national press is saying, but which every CHRO reading this already knows in their bones: boards hire for the things they measure, and they didn't measure this.

Rousseau was presumably hired because he could run an airline. Fair enough. Running an airline is quite hard. It involves fuel costs, unionised pilots, byzantine safety regulations and an unceasing requirement to lose people's luggage creatively. These are serious competencies.

But language - in Canada, of all places - is not a soft skill. It is not a box on a form. It is not something you paper over with a promise to take evening classes. In a country with two official languages, where one of your largest markets is a French-speaking province with its own language minister, its own language watchdog, and its own reflexively outraged National Assembly, the linguistic capability of your CEO is a core competency.

It belongs on the same line of the job spec as "ability to run an airline."

And if you hired someone who didn't have it - and then kept them on after they'd already caused one language scandal - then with the greatest respect, you did this. You. The board. HR. The nomination committee. Whoever sat in that room and decided that French could be dealt with later.

Later has arrived. It's wearing a Quebec flag and holding a resignation letter.

So Should You Sack Them?

Now we get to the question you've all been waiting for.

The short, unsatisfying answer is: it depends.

In Rousseau’s case, it has led to his exit – albeit a more stage-managed retirement than an outright firing. But don’t let that fool you, his language failings have cost him his job.

Of course, boards shouldn’t need to have this conversation, because you should never have been in it. But since we're here:

Sacking your CEO over language alone is almost certainly disproportionate - at least in the private sector, and at least in most contexts. Former Conservative cabinet minister Jason Kenney made the point that a national airline CEO's time might be better spent on safety and reliability than Duolingo. He is not entirely wrong.

But Rousseau's problem isn't really French. It's what French has come to represent. It's the fact that he was warned, made promises, took 300 hours of lessons, and still couldn't manage one paragraph of prepared remarks in the language of his headquarters city, at the most emotionally significant moment of his tenure. The crisis management expert was right: this is a question of transparency, of ethics, of whether you actually mean what you say.

A CEO who demonstrably fails to deliver on a five-year commitment - in full public view, in a high-stakes moment - has a credibility problem that transcends language. That is a leadership problem. And leadership problems don't tend to get better.

What You Should Actually Do Now

If you're a CHRO at a federally regulated company, or at any significant Canadian employer with francophone operations, employees or customers, here's what the Rousseau affair should prompt you to do immediately:

1. Audit your executive language profiles. Not their CVs. Their actual, tested, verified proficiency levels. Canada has a perfectly good Second Language Evaluation system. Use it. A CBC proficiency level is the required standard for most senior bilingual positions. Do your execs meet it?
2. Make language a succession planning criterion, not an afterthought. The next time you're building a long list for a CEO role, "bilingual" should be on the brief. Not "willing to try." Bilingual.
3. Stop accepting "I'm working on it." Rousseau said he was working on it in 2021. He had 300 hours of classes. He still delivered two words of French in a four-minute video. If someone cannot demonstrate progress on a language commitment after five years, the commitment was never real. Treat it like any other unmet performance target.
4. Build crisis communication protocols that don't rely on one person's linguistic limitations. If your CEO isn't bilingual, someone on stage with them should be. Someone who reads the prepared French statement beside them. This isn't complicated. It's Communications 101. A speechwriter and a teleprompter would have saved everyone involved an enormous amount of grief.
5. Consider whether your language policy is legally current. Since 2023, the rules have changed. If you're a federally regulated employer with operations in Quebec or francophone regions and you haven't revisited your Official Languages compliance posture, do it now. The fines and reputational damage are not theoretical.

The Bottom Line

Two talented pilots are dead. A national airline is in crisis. And somehow, the story of the week has become about a CEO who couldn't be bothered - and that is precisely what it looks like from the outside - to prepare one paragraph in French.

The lesson isn't "sack your CEO if they can't speak French." The lesson is: don't hire one who can't, don't keep one who won't improve, and don't build a senior team where the linguistic capabilities of your leader are a PR liability waiting to go off.

Canada is a bilingual country. It has been since 1969. This is not a surprise.

Sort it out before the cameras are rolling.