Another good Christie Blatchford article about language chaos in Peel Region courts: 4,000-5,000 court cases alone requiring Punjabi translation

On Friday I blogged about a Globe and Mail article by Christie Blatchford, in which she described how incompetent translators were undermining the administration of justice in the courts of Peel Region, just outside Toronto. Blatchford has a second article on this topic in today's Globe.

Blatchford is a top-notch reporter and I applaud her for writing about this important subject. At the same time, however, I feel a little frustrated. Blatchford correctly points out that defendants who don't speak English should be provided with a competent translators, but nowhere does she question the immigration policy that made this ridiculous situation possible.

Training and hiring translators is expensive. Where is the money going to come from? Yes, by all means, the authorities should do something about the situation in Peel Region, but that's not enough. Canada needs to limit the number of non-English-speaking immigrants it accepts each year. The language chaos Blatchford describes is a government-manufactured problem. If Canada had a sensible immigration policy, this situation would never have arisen in the first place.

Blatchford writes:

Consider: Polish, Cantonese, Mandarin, Spanish, Farsi, Tamil, Hungarian, Korean, Vietnamese, Albanian, Punjabi, Hindi, Greek, Sinhalese, Russian, German, Romanian, Cambodian, Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, Macedonian, Laotian, Nepali, Dutch, Gujarati (the language of the State of Gujarat, on the west coast of India), Bengali, and Twi (the language of about six million people in Ghana) are just some of the languages that are spoken by the residents of the Region of Peel, just west of Toronto.

Consider further: In that fast-growing, and arguably the most multicultural part of Canada, there are estimated to be between 4,000 and 5,000 court cases alone requiring Punjabi translation every year.

The article gives more than one example of incompetent translators:

The damning revelations are contained in a lengthy judgment released two days ago by Ontario Superior Court Justice Casey Hill, who sits at the Brampton courthouse in Peel, and reported in yesterday's Globe and Mail.

Judge Hill's stinging judgment, which stems from an appeal he was hearing, is chockablock with concrete examples both of the appalling state of interpreters at this courthouse and beyond, and of the potentially devastating impact of lousy translations.

[. . .]

There was interpreter Manjeet Bhandhal, a Hindi-speaking woman who was hired at the Brampton courthouse at a time when what they needed was a Punjabi-speaking translator. Ms. Bhandhal was apparently quite open that she had never spoken Punjabi before in her life, but was nonetheless assigned to do just that in weekend bail courts. An official with the Ontario Attorney-General's ministry told Judge Hill that he believes Ms. Bhandhal can't even read Punjabi. It appears that the quality of her interpretation played a role in a case that ended in a mistrial.

[. . .]

The example from Mr. Moustacalis is this. An irate family complained that their son had been arrested for breaching a bail condition. The condition prohibited him from returning to his house. It turns out that the court interpreter at his bail hearing had given the condition precisely the opposite meaning, and told the young man he was free to go to the house on one occasion and retrieve his belongings. So that's what he did, and he was promptly arrested.