Language policy must be concrete and specific

Let’s say that you’re an Iqaluit resident and the only language you know is Inuktitut. It’s one o’clock in the morning, you’re scared, and you need to call the police.

If you ever find yourself in such a situation, be prepared to speak English. It’s the only language that the dispatcher on the other end of the phone line is likely to understand.

Right now, we have no way of knowing if either the Town of Iqaluit, which has provided a unilingual English dispatch service to Iqaluit residents for seven years, or the RCMP, which pays the Town $142,000 a year for the RCMP’s portion of the service, is willing or able to do anything about it.

But at least this much is painfully obvious: 15 years of territorial government official language policy, based on the much bragged about Official Languages Act, has done little to address the official language issues in Nunavut that most directly affect the lives of ordinary people.

The questions are easy to state: What essential territorial government services ought to be available? Where and when, and in which languages? Who should pay? And who should enforce the rules?

The process of answering those questions, and then transforming those answers into concrete actions won’t be easy.

But that is what government language policy is for: providing concrete answers to specific questions. Unfortunately, this is a process that has barely begun. Nunavut’s political leaders have, of course, supplied us with plenty of empty rhetoric, but have so far demonstrated little understanding of the real issues.

For example, during the tenure of the Office of the Interim Commissioner, Nunavut residents were subjected to an immense amount of talk about the creation of a “user-friendly” government in Nunavut. And yet only a couple of months before the creation of Nunavut on April 1, the Baffin Regional Health and Social Services Board had to be embarrassed into providing adequate interpreter services for unilingual Inukitut-speaking patients in Ottawa.

If the Nunavut government is to be a credible institution in the eyes of Inuit, it must be prepared to identify those key points of contact where the greatest numbers of people seek access to essential government services. After that, the Nunavut government must ensure that Nunavut residents are able to gain that access in the Inuit language. The Nunavut government should also prioritize those services in a way that places the greatest weight on the most crucial life-and-death services.

Surely, that includes the kind of service that a frightened person seeks when they call the police in the middle of the night. Other obvious priorities ought to be the health care system, the justice system, and social services.

The Nunavut government will be tempted, no doubt, to spend its limited amount of language promotion money on constructing a lavish public language show at the legislature. That’s what the GNWT did, and as a result, the old Yellowknife government often neglected the bread-and-butter language needs of ordinary people in the communities. JB