Voters of Richmond, British Columbia (BC) will head to the polls on Saturday, November 15 to elect a mayor, eight councillors, and seven school trustees. A hot topic during the buildup of this election has been the city’s controversial foreign language signs. The issue surfaced last year when two Richmond residents presented a petition that had over 1000 signatures to city council in hopes of limiting the amount of foreign language (primarily Chinese) on business’ signs. Council initially struck down the proposal, saying it was up to the business owners to decide what was displayed on their signs. Evelina Halsey-Brandt, a long serving councillor who is not seeking re-election, dismissed the proposal at the time but has since changed her stance on the issue. After seeing a development sign in her neighborhood which contained no English text, she said, “It’s one thing for businesses to advertise only in Chinese, but on development signs that are supposed to inform me of what’s going on in my neighbourhood?”
Richmond, BC is a suburb of Vancouver, and is one of the most significant Chinese communities in Canada; more than half of its population of 205 000 descend from China. As a result, companies are targeting the Chinese community through billboards and other advertisements written entirely in Chinese. Two weeks ago, at a general council meeting, city councillors unanimously agreed to a resolution directing staff to conduct a broad public consultation on the matter. This will include consulting business owners and multicultural community groups, in addition to investigating the “effects foreign language signs have on community harmony.”
We are used to seeing language debates springing from Quebec’s interest in having French predominate English in the province. Quebec’s “language police” have moved against companies and stores whose advertisements and signs are exclusively in English. To contrast the situation in Quebec to that in Richmond, the debate in Quebec is about mandating the province’s official language (French) over English; in Richmond, the debate is about mandating one of Canada’s official languages (English) over a growing-but-unofficial language.
Brad Salzberg, a online commenter on an article titled Sign By-law Vote Could Come in 6 Months which was published by the Richmond Review, points out that all of the controversy over violations to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms may be unwarranted because another Canadian suburb, coincidentally named Richmond Hill, Ontario, already has a by-law in place regarding foreign language signage. Under this by-law, signs containing less than 50% English or French are prohibited.
The Richmond Chamber of Commerce has expressed that the city’s sign issue is best left to free enterprise; if a local business wants to exclude non-Chinese speaking members of the population (nearly two million in Metro Vancouver), then that is their decision. Four years ago, Moncton, New Brunswick, which has a roughly two-thirds English speaking and one-third French speaking population, turned down a citizens request to make bilingual signage mandatory, opting instead for the gentle encouragement route to solve the issue. Solutions such as monetary incentives, city-funded workshops, and dedicated translators to help business owners develop English language signage were all proposed to try to solve the signage language issue without requiring a by-law to be put in place. To contrast, in Dieppe, a Moncton suburb, instituted a by-law which demanded that French be prominent displayed on nearly all new signage.
There appears to be two separate debates at play here: the first is whether or not small business owners and advertising agencies should be forced to display signs with at least one of the country’s official languages, while the second is that development signs and other public notices relating to a neighborhood should show one of the country’s official languages. Whether a by-law is introduced to address one or both of these debate topics will not be known for few months, but in the meantime the representatives involved in the upcoming municipal election are scrambling to pick a side in the hopes of gathering more votes.
Leave a Reply