Courthouse interpreter Candiah Nadarajah, shown outside the old city hall courthouse in Toronto, says new tests for interpreters are "a miserable failure."Della Rollins for the Globe and Mail.
A program to test the competence of court interpreters has alienated the profession, triggering delays to trials and fraying the nerves of judges.
The idea behind the testing was to erase any doubt about the interpreters' proficiency. Instead, it has caused many interpreters to cut back on their workload or abandon court work altogether.
"They shot themselves in the feet, and now they can't walk," said Candiah Nadarajah, a Tamil interpreter with 20 years of experience. "The way the test was conducted was a miserable failure. They have really, really hurt so many interpreters. How can they expect interpreters to perform their job when their image has been tarnished?"
Mr. Nadarajah said that interpreters will keep leaving and many criminal charges will be stayed due to excessive delay unless the Ministry of the Attorney General publicly concedes its mistake. "So many cases have been thrown out already, and there are much more to come," he said. "It is more than a mess."
The recent trial of David Chen - a Toronto grocer who made a citizen's arrest - was the just the most high-profile example of a situation that is recurring daily.
In response to concerns about the quality of courtroom interpretation, the ministry asked a B.C. education centre to create proficiency tests for all its interpreters. What was already a shortage of qualified interpreters worsened after the testing backfired, with a majority failing the test.
This week, Ontario Court Judge, Madam Justice Mary Lou Benotto, called attention to the problem anew when she had to adjourn a bail hearing because no Mandarin interpreters were available.
On the day of her outburst, Judge Benotto's courtroom was occupied by two Crown prosecutors, a registrar, a court reporter, security staff, two defence lawyers and a pair of Chinese-Canadian defendants - Zhao Hui Chen and Peng Ren.
"If you have been following discussions lately, this issue is really big and hugely problematic," she said, according to a transcript obtained by The Globe and Mail. "This is the most ridiculous, frustrating situation. It's an absurd situation that we have four counsel, the accused, the entire court - ready to go."
Judge Benotto reluctantly adjourned the bail hearing for two or three weeks. "It's not just all of our availability, it's also the interpreter's availability - which is really the tail wagging the dog," she said.
The scenario is playing out more and more as court administrations fail to keep up with demand fuelled by open immigration policies, jeopardizing a key guarantee embedded in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
Peter Lindsay, a lawyer for one of the defendants in Judge Benotto's courtroom, said that at least one case he is involved in per month collapses because an interpreter is unavailable.
"We have a multicultural society and lots of people who don't function well in English," Mr. Lindsay said. "For them to meaningfully defend themselves and participate in their trials, they need an interpreter. It is very important to have good-quality justice for everybody, not just for English-speaking people."
Mani Velupillai, one of the interpreters who failed the test, said that many judges have recently prevented lawyers from interrogating interpreters about their credentials because many of them leave the courtroom rather than being humiliated.
"How is it possible to judge my competency and capability if you don't understand my language?" Mr. Velupillai said. "It's a joke."
"The testing program foolishly focused on whether interpreters could attain an unrealistic interpretation speed of 210 words per minute," he said. "It was a carpet bombing. I'm very proud of failing the test because it was not a good test. It was very humiliating and insulting. The remedy has been worse than the malady."
Mr. Nadarajah said there were 16 Tamil interpreters when he started out 20 years ago: "Now, there are only five for the whole of Ontario. Even before the testing, the ministry was really struggling to cope. Some people get so fed up with this that they retire or move on to other more lucrative jobs. Some have even left the country.
"Ministry officials thought they were on the right track, but unfortunately, they were not," he added. "The judges are furious about the way they have handled the solution."
Full-time interpreters typically earn from $40,000 to $80,000. Most augment their income by racing back and forth between other agencies, tribunals and hospitals picking up extra work.
Mr. Nadarajah said that they tend to be immigrants who have a sophisticated understanding of idiomatic nuances used in their home countries. Tamil, for example, has 247 letters in its alphabet, many of which combine with others to form still more letters.
Mr. Nadarajah said he has restricted his work to guilty pleas, sentences or bail hearings. "It's not that I don't want to do trials," he said. "I just don't want to subject myself to the aggravation of these voir dires [trials within a trial] The moment they suggest it, I bow out. I get less money to do a trial, anyway."
According to the ministry, there are 25 full-time interpreters and about 800 freelancers in the province. Ministry spokesmen were unable to produce estimates this week of the court time lost or financial costs of the interpretation problem.