Former industry minister John Manley appeared before the Bill C-32 committee yesterday, and I believe that in talking about the bill, he said, “The perfect is the enemy of the good”.
I think that applies here. The notion that we have to jump from zero to 300,000 on day one and find a way to ensure that every single piece is translated is going to ensure it never happens. There is an awful lot of documentation and a lot of data already translated, so when I talk about all this crown copyright material as an example, this stuff is made available and is already translated.
As was rightly noted, there are many sorts of data sets, especially when we're largely dealing with just numbers. The ability to translate some of that stuff in relatively short order--stuff produced out of StatsCan, produced out of some other government departments--I would have thought would be fairly straightforward. Will other data sets that are more text-based present a challenge? Absolutely.
If it were me, at that point I would suggest that we go for the low-hanging fruit and make available just about everything we can, recognizing that this is going to be an issue for a lot of other stuff. When we get to that point, or even before, we start having the discussion about whether it is a requirement that everything be translated or whether we can adopt an approach of translating these things on demand. In this way, if a Canadian citizen or a certain number of Canadian citizens make a formal request that the document be available in English or French or in whatever language it isn't available, there is an undertaking to ensure that it is made available in that language, but we don't start from the position that everything has to be made accessible before it can even be released.