Language directorate to address French, Inuktitut issues in GN

MIRIAM HILL

The manager of the Language Bureau in Kugluktuk is thrilled the government is moving toward meeting its obligations under the Official Languages Act.

The department of culture language elders and youth has created a directorate of official languages and appointed Chris Douglas as its first leader.

“We’re extremely busy,” said Ida Ayalik-McWilliams, manager of the language bureau. Though the department is responsible for all the translating and interpreting required by the government, it has only one French translator and two Inuktitut translators on staff.

“We’ve always been short staffed,” she said. “We should have three Inuktitut and then three Innuinaqtun, our divisional officer who looks after all the paper and the flow, and we should have a language researcher position, but we don’t have that filled either. We have one French translator in Iqaluit and then we have a couple more staff in Igloolik.”

The annual budget for contracting out translation was depleted in November, and won’t be replenished until April.

She said they’re simply scratching the surface of the work that needs to be done and hopefully an official language directorate can help them communicate their needs to the government as a whole.

Douglas, who has been in the job for a month, said he will act as a support for the language bureau and help them prioritize.

Before the directorate was created, he said, language was “all over the place” at CLEY.

“Because there are a lot of expectations from the government and the public as well to get things going, they decided to focus official languages under a directorate,” he explained.

Coming most recently from the office of the language commissioner with experience working with official languages under the government of the Northwest Territories, Douglas said his role is to try to match the expectations of the public and the government’s language obligations, and to try and get the machinery of government to respond to the issues.

He has a team of 11, made up of 10 Inuktitut-speakers and one other qallunaak who serves as the French translator/interpreter. They are working on many projects already and Douglas offers support as needed.

“A big part of my job is to start sorting out some of these policy issues around official languages — so how is the government going to respond as a whole to the Official Languages Act, the Bathurst Mandate commitments, to the language aspects of the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement?” he said.

The directorate has approached its daunting task by laying the groundwork for an interdepartmental working group at the assistant deputy minister level to look at programs, policies and legislation services, and decide where the priorities are.

He hopes the first meeting of the working group will be in March, with the goal of having key programs, policies and services identified by December.

Douglas’ position is funded in part by Nunavut’s cooperation agreement with the federal government for the promotion of official languages. That agreement has two purposes — to support the constitutional requirement to provide French services within the government of Nunavut and to support community language initiatives.

CLEY’s position, Douglas said, is that the federal government should also be supporting the delivery of Inuktitut services within the government because they have obligations under the Nunavut Act and the land claim. Canadian Heritage hasn’t yet agreed with them. The language initiative money, $1.1 million, can support any official language, and in the past some of that money has been sent back to the federal government unspent because the project didn’t work at the community level.

Douglas said his team will pull together a strategy and help departments figure out how to meet their French language obligations and use the funding more effectively so it doesn’t get sent back to the federal government.

“At the same time, we don’t want to be dealing with French language services in isolation because that’s really just a small part of the bigger picture. While we work on that French aspect, we’ll be looking at Inuktitut as well. So this interdepartmental strategy is to treat languages as a whole and not compartmentalize,” he explained.