When trade talks with Trump broke down, Prime Minister Mark Carney gave a list of reasons why Canada would not be signing a deal. One of the big ones was protecting the French language.
His cuts to the very the services that keep French alive in Canada tell a different story.
The Translation Bureau, the federal agency that provides translation, interpretation, and terminology services to government and Parliament, announced last year it would be reducing its workforce by 25 per cent over the next five years. The cuts are dismantling the Bureau’s capacity and creating a vicious cycle: fewer translators, heavier workloads, and mounting pressure to do “good enough” work.
For francophones, that means putting equal access to federal services and full participation in Canadian democracy at risk. Carney is weakening the very workforce that protects the language he says he is defending.
Then comes the promised fix for the damage those cuts leave behind: artificial intelligence. Cut the people who do the work and provide expert oversight, promise technology will make up the difference, and call it efficiency.
But in reality, AI only produces unreliable machine output that resembles another language; it cannot guarantee that the true purpose of a translation – getting information across from one language to the other – is actually fulfilled.
In the hands of professional translators who have the training to use it, it's a useful tool, but it cannot replace their expertise. After all, you wouldn’t ask a butcher to perform surgery just because they’re used to cutting into meat and bones. Francophones should not have to settle for unreliable machine output when anglophones get documents written by a human.
The Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC) has pointed out that the government’s AI strategy commits more than $2 billion without guarantees of public accountability if the technology fails to deliver on its promises. Federal language professionals are the canaries in the coalmine of this experiment and can confirm: hype and claims of “efficiency” far outweigh any respect for professional standards and quality assurance when this government rolls out AI tools.
As federal language professionals head into negotiations for a new collective agreement, they are fighting to protect the human expertise that sustains Canada’s bilingualism, and especially French language and culture. That means stopping massive cuts, reinvesting in the Translation Bureau as a linguistic centre of excellence, setting enforceable AI safeguards, and ensuring manageable workloads and healthy working conditions — so francophones can count on the same quality of public services as anglophones.
French cannot be a shield Carney raises against Trump, only to lower it when no one is looking. His cuts have created a two-tier system that treats francophones as second-class citizens. If French matters enough to defend at the trade table, it matters enough to protect the workers who keep it alive at home.
Antoine Hersberger
Vice-president, TR
