Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Forgive me, I hope that I am not going to have a huge coughing fit. I am not in very good shape today.
Thank you for inviting us.
The Canadian Association of Professional Employees essentially represents a large group of 12,000 members who work in economics, statistics and policy analysis. We also represent all the government's translators, interpreters and terminologists, who are all employed by the Translation Bureau. I am testifying today on behalf of that group, accompanied by our vice-president, who represents the terminologists, interpreters and translators.
They are all directly affected not only by the implementation of the machine translation tool, but also by a series of changes made over the years that make us wonder whether the Bureau has lost its way a little. We are wondering whether it is still wondering whether it should be a commercial undertaking or whether it is the institution that should be the guardian of linguistic duality and compliance with the Official Languages Act in Canada.
There is clearly a great dichotomy between these two visions and it would seem that the first approach has prevailed in recent years to the great detriment of the quality of the Bureau's services and of its members who have seen their numbers decrease drastically in favour of subcontractors and what we call phantom translation units. It is hard to imagine not paying doctors and not hiring new doctors, but that is exactly what is happening in the Translation Bureau. No one new has been hired for five years. Through this inexorable attrition, about 33% or 34% of the translators have disappeared.
Professor Jean Delisle declared that, in some minds, translation was ”the necessary evil of Confederation”. In his view, the actions taken by the Bureau's management and the economic straightjacket strapped on it by the previous government only reinforces this prejudice.