Procedure and House Affairs Committee on May 3rd, 2018

[Malcolm Williams]

Each provincial association has its own code of ethics.

[David Graham, Liberal, Laurentides—Labelle, QC]

Would it be possible for you to share those—whatever you can get your hands on—with the committee?

[Malcolm Williams]

I can send you the links.

[David Graham, Liberal, Laurentides—Labelle, QC]

I appreciate that. Thank you.

I'm going to go back to Scotland for a second.

You mentioned that there are only two speakers of Gaelic and that you've had Norwegian spoken. What other languages have been tried, and when did it first happen?

[Bronwyn Brady]

We've had a lot of languages used in the Chamber. When a language is used that isn't one that we support, as it were, such that we won't put it into the record, what we do is report the English interpretation. We've had witnesses giving evidence in Czech, in German, and in French, and we've had members in the Chamber offering small bits of speeches. We used to fairly regularly have a debate on the European Day of Languages, when everybody would wheel out their own favourite sentences in some other language, and that all went onto the record.

There has been quite a wide variety of languages used right from the very beginning. One of the very earliest experiences of that was in the early 2000s when we studied an education bill that was very pertinent to Gaelic, and we had a lot of witnesses using Gaelic. In fact, it's in committees, really, that most Gaelic is used, when witnesses come along and give evidence. That is interpreted, and then of course, that is all included on the record.

[David Graham, Liberal, Laurentides—Labelle, QC]

Do the Chamber and committees have permanent translation infrastructure, or are there temporary booths on request?

[Ruth Connelly, Head of Broadcasting, Scottish Parliament]

We have two permanent double booths that can take two interpreters in each. We have six committee rooms in the Scottish Parliament where we can have six committees meeting simultaneously. The two largest committee rooms—that's rooms 1 and 2—also have two double booths in them, and they are used.

We actually provide an interpretation service quite regularly because the presiding officer regularly has visitors from other countries to the VIP gallery for, say, first minister's question time, so we are regularly working with these interpreters. The visiting delegation brings their own interpreters, and Linda isn't required to book interpreters, so we work with them quite regularly.

I agree with Mr. Williams on one point about interpreters working remotely. They don't like that, but we have had occasion to do that because we've done some events where we have had multiple languages spoken. We set up 12 booths in another room and just fed the video to these interpreters in their individual booths. We gave them each a separate television monitor so that they could see, because interpreters don't like not having clear lines of sight, and they won't work with just audio either. It's such an intensive and highly pressurized job that it's better if they're actually in or adjacent to the room that they're interpreting from.

[David Graham, Liberal, Laurentides—Labelle, QC]

If someone wants to speak a language that you're not able to provide interpretation for in a timely manner, would you accept for them to provide a written translation into English of what they intend to say, for someone to read from that booth?

[Ruth Connelly]

Bronwyn can maybe answer this, but I think the answer to that would be yes.

[Bronwyn Brady]

Yes, I think so, certainly if it were a member, for example, who wanted to do that. In fact, that's exactly what happened with the minister who delivered part of his speech in Norwegian. He gave us the Norwegian text and the English text, and that's what we used. Yes, we have done that.

[David Graham, Liberal, Laurentides—Labelle, QC]

Who would be the person reading that into the record? Would it be the minister's staff? Would there be someone provided whose job it would be to read the translated statement, or would it be an official interpreter?

[Bronwyn Brady]

It was interpreted at the time, but I have to say, from the point of view of Hansard, we used what the minister gave us.

[David Graham, Liberal, Laurentides—Labelle, QC]

Okay.

If somebody were to speak a language that wasn't expected in the Chamber and obviously couldn't provide the interpretation for, would it still be translated for the Hansard?

[Bronwyn Brady]

If people are going to use a language that we can't find an interpreter for, and if it's not a huge, long, 10-minute speech—if they just want to say a few paragraphs or something—we will encourage them to speak in that language but then to say, “This is what I said,” and repeat it in English. That's how we get around that one.

[David Graham, Liberal, Laurentides—Labelle, QC]

But if they don't do that, you don't proactively look for someone who speaks the language to transcribe it.

[Bronwyn Brady]

No, we don't.

[David Graham, Liberal, Laurentides—Labelle, QC]

Thank you.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Blake Richards]

Next up we have Mr. Reid for five minutes.

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON]

We're in five-minute rounds now?

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Blake Richards]

Yes, we're in five-minute rounds, but if you need a little more time, we had some of the rounds in the beginning that didn't get used fully, so I don't imagine there is an issue there.

[Scott Reid, Conservative, Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston, ON]

Thank you.

I want to turn to our friends from Scotland.

First of all, welcome, and thank you for staying up late.

I don't know if they have our riding names listed here, but I represent a district called Lanark—Frontenac—Kingston. As you can tell from the Lanark part, it's an area of Scottish settlement. I live in the town of Perth, so I have a deep affection for our ancestral language.

I want to ask you a question, as a starting point, to get a sense of how many people have a need and an ability. If we compare Scotland to its nearest counterpart, to Ireland, we see that there are about 57,000 native Gaelic speakers in Scotland and about 75,000 in Ireland. However, in Ireland, because of their education program, there are also—at least in principle, according to census data—about 1.8 million people who can speak it as a second language.

Is there something parallel in Scotland, or is the number of second-language speakers much lower?

[Bronwyn Brady]

Do you have the numbers for it, Linda?

[Linda Orton]

I don't have them with me, but it's around about 80,000 who have knowledge or a skill in Gaelic, of whom around about half have written ability, and around about half have spoken ability.

[Bronwyn Brady]

Yes.

[Linda Orton]

So, yes, it's about 1% of the population who have some ability to speak, and it's about half of that who can actually read Gaelic as well. The numbers are very small. UNESCO classifies it as an endangered language.