Last year when Winnipeg Liberal MP Robert-Falcon Ouellette delivered a statement in the House of Commons decrying violence against native women, he didn’t speak to make himself understood. Quite the opposite.

Ouellette – the son of a mother from Tottenham, England and a father from the Red Pheasant Reserve in Saskatchewan − chose to speak to his fellow parliamentarians in Cree, a language only a handful of other MPs can comprehend.

He later rose to complain that his speech was not simultaneously translated in the same manner as all members’ statements made in English or French. This complaint triggered a series of dutiful responses, including an investigation by the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs. During the requisite hearings that followed, several native witnesses testified that “languages are an essential element of culture and shape the way we think…[and] organize our thoughts.” The committee itself proclaimed the state of Indigenous language usage across Canada to be “alarming and troubling,” and further asserted that “the inability of members to speak in an Indigenous language in the House and be understood immediately is not consistent with current Canadian values.”

The result of this perceived violation of Canadian values was a recommendation, approved by the House of Commons several weeks ago, that simultaneous translation be now provided from whatever native language an MP might wish to use in any debate or committee work, with modest prior notice, into English and French. In doing so the House explicitly recognized all Indigenous languages as having “special status,” due to protections of pre-existing aboriginal rights in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The line, if any, between this special status and the official status enjoyed by English and French was not made clear. It may not even matter, given the open-ended promise of translation when necessary.

Having thus established the right to speak any and all native languages in parliament, Ouellette indulged himself in a Martin Luther King moment. “When I was first elected to the House of Commons, I had a dream,” he said as the translation plan was being approved. “A dream that a grandmother from her reserve could turn on the television and watch the great debates of Parliament in her Indigenous language, whether it was Cree, Anishinabeg, an Iroquoian language, Innu or any language across Canada.”

As virtuous or reconciliatory as it may seem, however, to elevate the panoply of native languages to the status of English or French, practical matters inevitably intrude. “Given that there are approximately 60 different Indigenous dialects in Canada,” the House of Commons Translation Bureau pointed out in a briefing note obtained through Access to Information, “the capacity of qualified freelance Indigenous interpreters…is extremely limited.” Cost is also likely to be a big issue, the translation office noted. Ouellette’s soaring oratory about providing native grandmothers everywhere with simultaneous translation of debates and other official business may prove rather difficult to pull off. And of rather dubious value, beyond the overt political symbolism. How many grandmothers can realistically be expected to watch debates (much less the endless and often stultifying committee hearings), regardless of translation services? Much more likely is that the insertion of dozens of new and obscure languages into Canada’s raucous parliamentary debates will make coherent political discussion even less commonplace than is currently the case, as international experience already suggests.

Then again, this plan for a poly-lingual House of Commons is hardly the end goal. Rather it should properly be seen as the first step in a much more ambitious project that aims to have Ottawa take on the globally-unprecedented mandate of reviving all the country’s dying or near-dead Indigenous languages in situ. And here the economic issue of opportunity cost rears its head with far greater force. The resources required to accomplish such a Sisyphean task will inevitably steal money from other efforts that promise far greater outcomes for native and non-native Canadians alike. It will also further isolate Indigenous Canada from the rest of the country, thus denying the many benefits of modern economic and educational progress to those who need it the most. Finally, there is ample evidence that such a scheme is almost guaranteed to fail. It’s time to speak up about the folly and fantasy of trying to preserve Canada’s many dying and doomed native languages.

Trudeau’s official languages promise

In their 2015 election platform, the federal Liberals heroically promised to “promote and preserve Indigenous languages.” Their first budget added an extra commitment to “enhance” these languages as well. Then, at an Assembly of First Nations (AFN) conference late in 2016, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau went much further in announcing upcoming federal legislation that would ensure the “preservation, protection, and revitalization of First Nations, Métis, and Inuit languages in this country.” (Emphasis added.) Such legislation will also enshrine a “constitutional right” to native languages beyond what has already been read into the Charter by the House of Commons. Originally scheduled for Fall 2018, Trudeau’s Indigenous language bill ought to be considered imminent, especially since 2019 has already been declared the United Nations’ Year of Indigenous Languages.

How many languages are the Liberals promising to revitalize? That isn’t clear. The Translation Bureau uses the common shorthand of 58 individual languages divided into ten root families. Statistics Canada says there are 70. According to UNESCO, Canada is home to 87 Indigenous languages. Of these, only a very few are considered viable, including Cree (96,575 speakers, according to Canada’s 2016 Census), Inuktitut (39,770 speakers) and Ojibway (28,130). Usage even among these most-widely spoken native tongues has been falling dramatically for decades. The percentage of Canada’s aboriginal population who can conduct a conversation in their heritage language fell from 21 percent in 2006 to 15 percent in 2016.

Even worse, three-quarters of all native languages in Canada are categorized by UNESCO as either vulnerable or endangered; nearly 40 percent (32 individual languages) are “critically endangered,” meaning they’re spoken only by the great-grandparent generation. Examples are Rigolet Inuktitut, heard exclusively in Rigolet, Labrador; Munsee, unique to the Moravian Indian Reserve in Southwestern Ontario; and Oowekyala from the central B.C. coast. All involve speaking populations of 50 or fewer very elderly individuals at a single, isolated location. Most of Canada’s Indigenous languages are thus less than a generation away from disappearing forever.

This isn’t a situation unique to Canada. More than half of the world’s estimated 6,000 languages are considered unlikely to survive beyond the end of our current century. In a couple hundred more years, there may be as few as 200 living languages. The thought of so many different tongues disappearing from Earth inevitably triggers many sentimental arguments in favour of their preservation. “We should care about dying languages for the same reason that we care when a species of animal or plant dies. It reduces the diversity of our planet,” writes Welsh linguist David Crystal, making a common parallel between entomology and etymology. Yet dying languages generally find themselves in peril for good reason − they no longer serve the useful purpose of facilitating communications among large groups of humans. As essayist Malik Keenan has pointed out, “A language spoken by one person, or even a few hundred, is not a language at all. It’s like a child’s secret code.”