Tasers, immigration, and language politics

Those of you not in Canada, and especially not in Vancouver, may not have been getting inundated with Robert Dziekański news—here, it’s been only slightly less covered than the Robet Pickton murder trial. In a nutshell, Dziekański, a Polish immigrant, was kept waiting in Vancouver International Airport (YVR) for ten hours before he apparently became agitated, inducing the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to shoot him repeatedly with Tasers. Much of this incident was captured on video (warning: huge trigger potential) by one of those nefarious cell phones that have the unfortunate tendency to record things that many people—law enforcement certainly included—would rather keep out of the public view. Dziekański died at the scene in YVR.

His death has rightly sparked outrage across the country, rising to the level of an international incident. It has prompted calls for reviews both specifically of how Dziekański’s case was handled and of how RCMP and other law enforcement agencies use Tasers in general. Every week, it seems, there’s another Taser-related death being reported in the media; recently Amnesty International figured that there had been at least 17 deaths directly linked to the use of Tasers since the weapons were introduced to Canadian law enforcement. I even heard a suggestion—a facetious suggestion, of course, but one that resounded particularly strongly among my local friends—that the newly introduced mascots for the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver didn’t really represent Canada or British Columbia as they exist today. What was the proposed alternative? A Mountie with a Taser. Bienvenue au Canada!

Seriously, though, this really does touch upon issues of language politics. Today, YVR released a preliminary report on how they would spend over a million dollars to improve security in the immigration area of the airport. If you’ve ever been to YVR—or pretty much any Canadian airport—you’ll know that all the signage is in both English and French, and at YVR there are many signs that are also printed in Chinese characters. Aside from the obvious ‘what good does French do’ question, which becomes somewhat more relevant the further away from Québec you go, a better question is ‘why aren’t signs in the Immigration section posted in more languages?’ This is something I’ve always wondered—even large airports in the United States, a country in which many states have notoriously anti-foreign language laws—post signs and employ interpreters for many different foreign languages. The rationale is obvious: how are you going to communicate with an immigrant—or even a resident—who doesn’t speak English if you don’t follow these steps? Yet YVR has been shamefully lacking in this department: although you have to be bilingual to work in the federal government, and therefore be a border guard/customs agent, ‘bilingual’ in this case means ‘both English and French’, and French is really not all that useful at the busiest airport on the North American end of the Pacific Rim.

Hopefully YVR will follow through and begin to employ more people with more varied linguistic skills than simply the government-mandated French and English. Such ‘biligualism’ across Canada, as advocated and established by the former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, is a fine thing. Now that the country’s got it, it’s time to expand to other languages; hopefully we can avert the next Robert Dziekański with proper communication.