In the literature on public policy instruments, there is very little consideration of contextual factors and their effects on the design of policy instruments, as well as on the decision-making process. An empirical study of the situation in New Brunswick, allows to identify the linguistic dimension as one of the most influential contextual factor in the design of public policy instruments (namely called deliberative mechanisms) and the resulting decision-making process. In this sense, we observe the impact of the linguistic variable at the level of deliberative mechanisms, but also at the level of the networks involved in the democratic exercise, at the level of state institutions, and at the level of the decision-making process. Our findings make it possible to conclude that public policy tools are translated differently in the context of complex linguistic relations (an assessment that can be transposed to the bilingual subnational context where various linguistic communities coexist).