The kind of problem we are seeing...and I'm not talking about the people who have been in Canada for 20 years; I'm talking about the people who arrived one month ago. If you ask the individual doctors, very often they don't have money for it and they say it's not their responsibility to provide interpretation; it's the responsibility of the patient to bring somebody with them. That's a huge challenge. If you come with your children or family members, there's the issue of confidentiality and of how much you want to disclose in front of your children. Very often, if that's the case, they learn faster than their parents.
Also, in the bigger institutions, like hospitals, very often they don't have a budget for it; it's not part of their annual budget to include interpretation. Interestingly enough, most of the hospitals do have budgets for sign language interpretation; there is a policy there. But when it comes to language interpretation, there's a lack of resources or even a lack of planning to include it. We have seen people be denied from going into the operating room. We have seen cases of where it has jeopardized a pregnant woman's health, and there have been a number of other issues we have seen because of the lack of these things.
I believe in some provinces they have different approaches, but in Ontario what we have seen is a combination of using volunteers.... And I'm talking about just our agency, not a huge city like Hamilton. We get around 5,000 immigrants per year. We provide 1,000 interpretations. You're talking about 600 to 700 interpretations per month for medical reasons, and how much professional, volunteer-based interpretation are you going to do to provide that?
Some departments and some hospitals have some resources there, and some don't. It's very inconsistent right now.