Canada’s Courts Service Warns Budget Squeeze Leads to Language Cuts

Canada’s Courts Administration Service (CAS), the agency providing administrative support to federal courts, warned that it may be unable to meet its linguistic obligations due to significant financial shortfalls.

According to its 2025-2026 Departmental Plan, CAS lacks the necessary resources to comply with the 2023-amended Official Languages Act (OLA), which mandates simultaneous availability in English and French of key judicial decisions, as well as legal matters of public interest or national importance.

Despite a nominal budget increase of CAD 3m (USD 2.1m) for the upcoming fiscal year (rising from CAD 205m to 208m [USD 146m to 148m]), CAS faces pressures from a projected budget decrease over the next three years.

The organization claims that the federal allocation is insufficient to cover the “very significant and resource intensive” impact of new legislative requirements. Furthermore, CAS considers that variable expenditures like translation, court stenography, and transcription deeply affect the organization’s finances.

“These costs are mostly driven by the volume, type and duration of hearings conducted in any given year, which are non-discretionary and can limit the organization’s financial flexibility,” states the plan.

Old Problem, New Solution

The FAJEF association, representing seven provincial groups of French-speaking jurists, has expressed deep concern over the lack of funds, reported the TFO media site.

The organization’s president, Justin E. Kingston, highlighted the years of effort invested in updating the Official Languages Act (OLA), adding that the situation “would certainly be detrimental, because that was exactly the objective of the amendment to the OLA — namely, to resolve inequalities in linguistic rights.”

But this is not a new concern. In 2024, CAS had already warned that without an influx of funds, it “would be forced to cease its translation and review operations.” FAJEF is calling on the federal government to allocate additional financial resources to ensure full compliance with the OLA.

TFO media also reports that the Federal Court announced in early October 2025 that it was increasing the use of AI as a support tool for human translators. The Court emphasized that “the tools are meant to assist in translation — they are not a replacement for the human doing the work,” and that a “control system” had been implemented to check translation accuracy.

At the same time, Canada is significantly advancing its commitment to AI adoption within the federal public service, highlighted by the September 2025 launch of GCtranslate. This AI model prototype, developed by Canada’s Translation Bureau, is designed for official language translation across government departments.

“The tools are meant to assist in translation — they are not a replacement for the human doing the work.” — Federal Court

GCtranslate was trained on the Bureau’s vast, 8-billion-word bilingual dataset and follows a successful three-month pilot of its predecessor, PSPC Translate, which translated over 60 million words. About the new model, the Bureau also echoed the Federal Court statement on AI tools, saying it is intended to complement, not replace, human translators.

The launch was a direct response to a previous surge in AI usage across government departments, including the Department of Justice’s JUSTranslate, to meet growing bilingual communication demands.