(Ottawa) If Pierre Poilievre becomes Prime Minister of Canada, “bureaucratic and academic” language will be banned from the public service. The Conservative Party leadership candidate promises to legislate to promote “as simple as possible” language in government communications.
Posted at 11:33 a.m.
“The official language of government is neither French nor English. He’s the “bureaucrat”, a lot of words to say nothing. It costs billions, disguises chess and drives people crazy. I will pass a Plain Language Act to ban bureaucratic jargon in government,” reads the message that topped a video posted Thursday by the Conservative leadership aspirant.
Because both for citizens and for small and medium-sized businesses, “it is very expensive” in time and money to fill out the forms issued by the federal government, he pleads. Thus it is necessary to legislate to oblige civil servants to give birth to documents and regulations where the language is “simple and clear”, judges the member for Carleton.
Under the legislation, government communications would have “the least [de] number and the simplest possible words (sic)”, and the Office of the Auditor General of Canada would be given the power to ensure that “the language used by departments is as simple as possible”. As for the citizens, they would have the possibility of filing complaints if they are confronted with bureaucratic jargon.
In the hiring process, the government will have to select civil servants who have demonstrated an ability to write “in a very simple way” and offer language training in a language “used by Mr. and Mr.me Everybody” rather than with “bureaucratic or academic terms that no one in the real world uses”, details Pierre Poilievre.
And to gossips who claim that “simplicity is the same thing as stupidity”, the candidate responds by brandishing the formula “E = mc2 by the famous scientist Albert Einstein. “It’s just five characters […] Would the formula have been any brighter if it had taken pages and pages of complexity to use? I think not. Simplicity was perfection,” argues the Ontario MP.
The man who is considered the favorite of the leadership race of the Conservative Party of Canada reiterates in conclusion his promise to “make Canada the freest country in the world” in this video published a little more than a week before the date of the announcement of the next leader of the Conservative troops. The name of the winner will be known on September 10.