Ottawa’s planned cuts expected to hit parliamentary interpreters

An official said the proposed new rules would lower the quality of interpretation services and undermine public access to government proceedings in Canada’s two official languages.

Professional interpreters are warning that the federal government’s plans to cut its procurement costs could compromise the public’s access to parliamentary, Supreme Court and other official proceedings in both official languages.

Jeremy Link, a spokesperson for Public Services and Procurement Canada, said the department recently began a process to replace the federal government’s existing freelance interpretation contracts.

As part of that process, the government is seeking to make several major changes to the procurement of services for Parliament and other institutions like the Supreme Court.

The Canadian branch of the International Association of Conference Interpreters, AIIC-Canada, said those changes include eliminating measures to protect interpreters’ hearing and adopting a “lowest bid” approach to replace the “best fit” model that considers applicants’ credentials and experience.

“This change would almost certainly have the effect of pushing the most experienced freelancers off an already short-handed team,” the organization said in a news release. It said that adopting a lowest-bid approach is “just about the money.”

In a letter to Prime Minister Mark Carney this month, AIIC-Canada president Alionka Skup said the proposed new rules would lower the quality of interpretation services and undermine public access to government proceedings in Canada’s two official languages.

Skup said the changes also ignore the current “severe shortage” of accredited and qualified suppliers of interpretation services. She said about 100 accredited and qualified freelancers now shoulder about 60 per cent of all parliamentary assignments.

Nicole Gagnon, a spokesperson for AIIC-Canada and a career freelance interpreter, said the shortage started before the pandemic but got worse as Parliament went virtual and interpreters like herself sustained injuries.