The Official Languages Act of 1969 gave the Translation Bureau the mandate to ensure linguistic quality throughout the machinery of government and to develop expertise and tools that would give it an international reputation. That was in 1969, and, at the time, it was a government service that was responsible for all translation activities in the federal government.
As a result of the program review at the beginning of the 1990s, the Bureau was transformed and, in 1995, became a special operating agency. That is when the dichotomy arose between its mandate to protect Canada's linguistic duality and the need to recover its costs. It must be said in passing that the Bureau was essentially asked to be a special operating agency and to function as a private business, but inside government. It is therefore not a crown corporation, but it is also not a government service in the classic sense. To use a vulgar expression, one could say that it is a bastard organization.
The Bureau is therefore forced to compete with the private sector, which does not have anywhere near the same operating costs. The Bureau had no choice but to adopt a mercantile approach that led it astray from its core mandate.
By comparison, Passport Canada, another special operating agency, has a monopoly on passport production. It is therefore free to set prices for its services that allow it to offset its costs. Unlike us, it has no clients.
The Bureau provides its language tools, such as Termium Plus, at no cost to private translators and translation companies that do not have to contribute to the cost of operating them. The Translation Bureau, for example, pays for the work of the terminologists who keep that tool up to date.
In addition, the Translation Bureau establishes annual service agreements with the federal departments and agencies. These are not really contracts, just simple agreements. For example, if there is a one-year agreement with Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness Canada for the Translation Bureau to translate its texts, and, right in the middle of the year, the department decides to go to the private sector and tells us about it out of the blue, it means that the Bureau has just lost a client. That prevents the Bureau from planning in the medium and long terms. It also explains why, as Emmanuelle said, we have lost 400 employees since 2002 and why the 140 people who will soon be retiring will not be replaced in 2017-2018. The translators and the administrative staff with whom they work in close cooperation will continue to do quality work, but they often do it at the expense of their physical and mental health.
Political and economic choices are undermining the ability of the Bureau's employees to produce quality work. They do it, but it is becoming harder and harder. Bureau employees are the victims of an unsustainable model. Sooner or later, the machinery will break down. Our members are devastated by this new reality, even more so because the Bureau management does not hold translators in any regard. For them, we are simply production numbers. There is also a lack of contact between senior management and the employees.
To save money, the Bureau has also been reorganized into affinity groups. Previously, we used to work with federal departments and agencies. That therefore developed expertise among the translators working with, for example, Employment and Skills Development Canada, Public Safety Canada, or the Department of National Defence. At the moment, with affinity groups, various areas, various departments, are grouped together. So it is much more difficult to develop that expertise and translators have to do it on the job.
Another problem has existed for some time: departments are creating phantom TR positions. They do not call them TRs; they go by other names, such as language quality advisors. Really they are discount translators, in violation of the Treasury Board directive, which gives the Bureau the monopoly on translation in the federal government. Essentially, departments have been told to either go to the private sector or to use the Translation Bureau, but not to create independent departmental translation services.