Madam Speaker, I want to thank all my colleagues who are here, and in particular, I want to thank my colleague who just spoke, the member for Cariboo—Prince George. I also want to thank my colleague from Nunavut for being here. Some of the comments I will be making today relate to the Inuktut language and may be of interest to him. If he gets the chance to ask a question or raise a comment, it would be nice if all of us would extend him a little extra time, given the importance of the language and that he personally represents the majority of its speakers in this country.
The goal of a language law, or any law, ought to be twofold. It is always to remediate a wrong. It ought to open-hearted in its approach, and we ought to go in with open eyes as to a clear setting of achievable, realistic goals. To fail to be open-hearted is to, quite frankly, be self-serving, even sinister. To fail to go in with open eyes as to the practicalities one is dealing with ensures one's own defeat.
This legislation, on the whole, is good, but it is imperfect on both those measures. I want to talk a little about this, with particular reference to the problem of the Inuktitut language and the fact that there is not complete support in the Inuktitut-speaking community for this legislation. This indicates that while good in many respects, the legislation is imperfect. It is imperfect because it targets one problem, where speakers of Inuktitut have a separate problem that is not being addressed in the legislation. I turn now to that discussion.
The problem of the decline of indigenous languages in Canada is not a new problem. It was identified a very long time ago and has been addressed by StatsCan in a number of interesting surveys over the years. I am looking at a document from 2007 that points out that the number of people speaking an indigenous language as their first language was in decline. It was quite a rapid decline. Between 1996 and 2001, the percentage of the indigenous population able to conduct a conversation in an indigenous language went from 29% to 24%. The number of people having an indigenous language as their mother tongue among people who were of indigenous ancestry dropped from 26% to 21%.
However, StatsCan noticed one encouraging trend, and it is the trend I think this legislation is designed to further, and that is the acquisition of an indigenous language as a second language or as a language spoken in parallel with one of the official languages, or for those who are fortunate enough, perhaps as one of their mother tongues.
The StatsCan report states:
Learning an Aboriginal language as a second language cannot be considered a substitute for learning it as a first language. Nevertheless, increasing the number of second language speakers is part of the process of language revitalization, and may go some way towards preventing, or at least slowing, the rapid erosion and possible extinction of endangered languages.
That is a salutary goal, as expressed by the author of this report for Statistics Canada 12 years ago, and it is a salutary goal as expressed in the preamble to this piece of legislation. However, it addresses the issue of languages that are in decline. It is a reasonable goal, but it is not necessarily going to succeed in all cases.
By way of example, I cite what happened in Ireland, where there was a widespread consensus when Ireland achieved independence, just under 100 years ago, that Irish Gaelic ought to be saved, ought to be preserved and ought to become a language of daily use. A nationwide consensus on this point, and a number of quite heroic measures, in some cases, caused the Irish language to become the only official language of the country. Money and postage stamps were printed in Irish alone. It was necessary to speak Irish to get a job in the public service, and so on. Areas called Gaeltacht, which were areas of Irish language use, were set up and made official language areas. Nonetheless, use of the Irish language, as both a percentage of language spoken in Ireland and in absolute numbers, continued to decline.
This is a very tough battle to fight. It is worth fighting, but I think we have to recognize that experience suggests that it is a very difficult battle indeed.
This is also a battle that is largely irrelevant to the speakers of a small number of very robust indigenous languages. This includes, in particular, Inuktut. It is on this basis that the Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami put forward a position paper on language legislation and also critiqued this bill. What it said in its critique, which came out on February 5, is quite interesting:
Our efforts to revitalize, maintain, and promote Inuktut are often blunted by inequitable federal funding policies that task us with doing much more with far fewer resources than what French and English speakers receive. At the same time, our people do not have the right to access federal services in Inuktut, relegating it to a status beneath English and French.
That is important for a very significant reason, a reason that would not be true for people who were picking up an indigenous language as a second language, for example, or who were fluent speakers of an indigenous language as well as one of the official languages. That is because there are many people who are unilingual speakers of the Inuktut language or who struggle in one of the other official languages, usually English, but not always.
To give an idea of just how robust the language is, I want to cite the number of Inuit speakers in different areas of northern Canada. In Nunavut, there are 26,800 speakers. That is 89% of the residents of the Nunavut region, including people of all backgrounds. In Nunavik, which is the northern part of Quebec, 99% of the population is capable of speaking Inuktut. In Nunatsiavut, an area in northern Labrador, it is a much smaller percentage, 21%, and in the Inuvialuit Settlement Region, which is in part of the Northwest Territories, it is 22%.
To get numbers of 89% and 99%, one is talking about a base in which many of those people speak only that language. Making sure that they can receive all government services and have access to everything, such as health care, education, tax forms and anything else the government offers, so they can operate as unilingual speakers of their language is absolutely critical. That is, frankly, absent from this legislation, because this legislation is addressing another problem, the problem of languages that do not have that many unilingual speakers, or perhaps no unilingual speakers. They are languages that are being forgotten. I cannot say enough how important that issue is. It is, however, a distinct problem.
To give colleagues an idea of just how distinct the situation of the Inuktut language is from other languages, I am turning now to some 2011 census data. We see that 95.3% of lnnu, or Montagnais, speakers have a very robust language. They use their language at home, which is the best way of determining whether it is the language in which they are most comfortable. That is very impressive, but it is based on 10,100 people. Among Atikamekw, 97% use their language at home. Again, that is out of a base of fewer than 6,000 people. By contrast, 95% of Inuktut speakers use their language at home, out of 36,000 people. That is a very large number, and many of those people do not speak a language competently other than Inuktut. Those people need to have their ability to function as full members of Canadian society taken into account.
I encourage the government to think about that very carefully, either with this legislation, as it says it is open to amendment, or else in a parallel piece of legislation.
I have to stop now due to considerations of time, but I would love to answer any questions anyone has.