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OTTAWA – The Union of Canadian Correctional Officers alleges that Ottawa would require it to pay for translation services in order to be able to negotiate in French at the negotiating table, failing which it would end the negotiations.
According to the UCCO-SACC-CSN union, the Treasury Board would have asked the union negotiators to waive simultaneous translation or assumed 50% of the costs for this service, under penalty of refusing to negotiate.
Since January 2023, the two sides have held three negotiation sessions where no translation service was available. This gave rise to “laborious sessions where everyone worked in duplicate”, qualifies Frédérick Lebeau, the national vice-president of UCCO-SACC-CSN who is also at the negotiating table.
Representatives of 7,500 correctional officers in 49 establishments located, among others, in Ontario, Quebec and the Atlantic, denounce a change compared to the last four negotiations, since its creation 20 years ago. A translation service, paid for by the federal government, was then made available to both camps.
According to Mr. Lebeau, the Treasury Board would have indicated that it is a question of cost reduction.
“We are capable of sacrificing the spirit of the Official Languages Act for a matter of cost, unfortunately,” he laments.
The office of the President of the Treasury Board, Mona Fortier, states that for all negotiations, “both parties share the cost of translations equally.”
“For negotiations with the Union of Canadian Correctional Officers, we are paying our fair share,” said Monica Granados, the minister’s press secretary.
The latter specifies that Treasury Board negotiators are bilingual. The union claims to have bilingual members, both French and English. The union believes that costs should not be a reason to ensure negotiations in both languages.
“According to my personal experience, I think they wouldn’t mind negotiating only in English,” considers Frédérick Lebeau.
The union of correctional officers is not against paying for translation services. “You just have to know in advance. You cannot arrive at the dawn of a negotiation and say: ”Ah ah, surprise, you are going to pay half or all of the translation costs”. We don’t have the money and these budgets weren’t adopted,” says Mr. Lebeau.
Having a translation service or a common language simplifies things enormously, explains the trade unionist.
“We can start in the morning in one language or another and there at the end of the day. You start looking for your words (…). Each word can have an influence on an article of the collective agreement so it is necessary to do the translation well and to have a correlation between French and English is essential. »
Political reaction
On Parliament Hill, the NDP is calling on “Treasury Board to correct this flagrant error and invest all the resources necessary to ensure simultaneous interpretation”.
“Workers negotiating their working conditions in good faith with the federal government must be able to do so in the language of their choice, without constraint (…). Here is another example of contempt for Francophone workers in our public service, it is intolerable,” denounced MP Alexandre Boulerice.
For the Bloc Québécois, this “new pitfall only confirms that in Ottawa, the only real official language is English. .
“Because it wants to negotiate in French, the union has to pay the bill. If the negotiating committee spoke entirely in English, there would be no translation, and therefore no cost,” laments MP Mario Beaulieu.
