EditorThis is a near-verbatim transcript of an in-person interview I did with Vicki Schmolka in Toronto, ON, on June 28, 2017, as part of my project to compile an oral history of the plain language movement in Canada between 1980 and 1995. Although the transcript reflects her views at the time, those views might have evolved since the interview took place.
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IC: Thank you, Vicki, for meeting with me today.
VS: You’re welcome.
IC: So I want to know how and when you decided to become involved in the plain language movement, what inspired you to join, when you really realized that it was a movement, it was something bigger than…
VS: It’s a bit of a complicated question because I’ve always been interested in communications. So I was the editor of my high school yearbook because no one else would do it, and then when I was in law school—or actually, even before then, when I was at college—there was no information sharing. We didn’t really know what was happening at the college, so I started a kind of daily bulletin where people would drop information in a box, and at the end of the day someone would type it up and I’d kind of edit it.
So I’ve always been someone who believes that information needs to be available to people, and it was actually… I ended up after law school working at the CBC. I guess that’s the most dominant part of my work, although that was contract work, and I did other things over the summer like trend analysis and different jobs—I know this is a long way to get to it—but at some point… and I was very active with the National Association of Women and the Law. During law school and after law school, I’d been on the board. And I happened to get a media release from the Department of Justice—federal Department of Justice—talking about their new public legal education program, and there were two elements to that. One was supporting public legal education work in the provinces, and the other was the department setting up its own public legal education service, and they were looking for a legal writer and I just answered… I mean it wasn’t even a job offer—it was really a news release about the program, and I answered it, and it was like… I mean, life is like this. The associate deputy minister in whose section or branch this was happening happened to be coming to Montreal, so he set up a breakfast meeting with me and the rest just… I ended up getting the job on contract for two months and then I got a three-month contract. So that was really being part of the Department of Justice Canada’s public legal education effort, which really morphed into plain language as a part of that.
But not really because I think the department always struggled with plain language drafting, but I’ve always thought when you’re doing public legal education materials, you are writing in plain language or you should be writing in plain language. That’s really how to be the most effective.
IC: Mm-hm.
VS: So I started working writing documents for the department, and then there was a workshop at the University of Waterloo that I went to that was probably the first plain language workshop in Canada and eventually after a few years I left the department and then I set up my own business as a plain language consultant.
IC: Can you tell me a little bit more about this workshop at the University of Waterloo?
VS: Um, not very much. I just remember Susan Krongold went, and she was doing drafting work. She’s a more formal plain language drafter. I don’t do legislation so much. And she was there, and I think Christine Mowat was there as well, so there might be a little bit of intelligence that you could glean from others. I probably don’t have the documents from there anymore, but someone was doing training on writing based maybe on what was happening in Australia and what was happening in Britain, but I don’t really remember who the teachers were or anything. I remember doing some exercises of “How would you do this?” and sort of talking about the fundamentals of good writing in that context. But I’m afraid… So it was somewhere between 1984 and 1989, because I did go as part of the Department of Justice, I’m pretty sure. I didn’t go on my own ticket.
IC: You mentioned that the workshop was maybe based on some stuff from the UK or Australia. How cohesive was the international plain language movement at that time and how would you compare what was happening in Canada with what was happening elsewhere?
VS: So this is very anecdotal. This is just my impression. I think Canada at the government level paid some lip service to the idea of plain language because they thought other people were doing it and they’d better do it and there were people within the system saying that, but I remember Robert Eagleson who was sort of the guru of plain language in Australia coming to Canada, and I was walking back from this workshop that he had been giving with the legal services director of maybe transport or one of the big departments, and he’s sort of… I said, “You know, what do you think?” and he said, “Well, you know, we keep it ambiguous and difficult on purpose. There’s reasons.” Haha—ok. We’re on different planets.
Although I appreciate his point. Sometimes you do leave ambiguity for purposes and whatever. So I don’t think from a drafting perspective the government was all that interested.
And I think in Britain there was sort of that whole Plain English Coalition or Commission, and I mean they were sort of aggressively outing people, and, you know, saying “This is bad,” “This is good,” and giving awards, and they were… They kind of came from the streets, right? There were people who were complaining about the welfare rules being too difficult to follow and contradictory and bad, so I think they came from a more militant background, and I think Australia maybe came from more… their legal community seized it more quickly, and I think in Canada it was just sort of a little more amorphous, loosey-goosey, putting your toe in the water but not really wanting to commit.
And maybe part of that is because the government perhaps cleverly put a little bit of money in and made it more corporate or bureaucratic and so there wasn’t the kind of uprising there was in Britain or even in the States with Citibank who did their first mortgage and stuff, so it never really had that grassroots—I don’t want to say anger component—but push. And therefore it kind of… People started competing for the money in a different context than demanding change.
IC: So you used the term “lip service.” Do you think that Canada is still a laggard in terms of providing plain language information?
VS: Information? Oh, it’s hard. I mean, I don’t think we’ve progressed very far in the, you know, 30-odd years that it’s been an issue. I mean, I think I got something recently from an insurer, and I thought, “Well, that’s pretty good.” You know, it was an improvement. I don’t think banks are trying very hard. I don’t think government is trying very hard. I mean, my municipality still uses “shall” in its drafting even though I’ve begged them not to. And, I mean, I was a city councillor for a while, so I had some control, and we did our official plan without using “shall,” and all their new amendments use “shall” again. You know, it’s sort of like, “Really? You just can’t break this habit?”
So I just don’t see… yeah, I don’t see it being a real… Like, you could say, “no smoking.” You know, there was a public consensus, concern—smoking was dangerous to your health. We shouldn’t allow smoking in restaurants or in buildings. You shouldn’t smoke too near a building. All of that.
I mean, you could say there’s something similar with plain language, that we should be communicating with people in language they understand. Consents for surgery should be in language you understand. Insurance contracts, etc., etc. But I don’t think there’s… There isn’t that social consciousness.
IC: OK. What do you think we could do to foster a social consciousness?
VS: I think people have to get angry at the crap they’re given. But, you know, the truth is people don’t read it. Like, you go rent a car, you don’t read the car rental agreement. I mean, all of this stuff… When you sign on to a website, you have to click that you’ve read the terms and conditions—you don’t do that. I mean, you might open it for fear that they won’t let you click the box unless you have opened it, but you don’t spend 20 seconds on it. So I think all of those things are… We haven’t hit that critical point where people say, “This is the way it’s going to be. Like, we can do this.”
IC: Right. It sounds from your experience at the municipal level that you tried to implement changes but they didn’t persist after you left, so that… passing on habits and information after, you know—it’s institutional memory that doesn’t happen.
VS: I think bad habits are hard to change, and I think lawyers are conservative, worried about the consequences of making change, don’t really want to make change, and aren’t pushed to make change when they don’t have to.
IC: Can you tell me about your consulting business?
VS: Well, I just started it up and offered my services. I didn’t always do public legal education materials. I’ve worked on policies like internal government policies and sometimes I’d really written a report that anybody could write, but clients just wanted me to assemble information. I always take the approach of “What does the reader need to know?” Like, so I’ve always got that plain language filter. I guess it’s just something you’re trained to do and so you do it. I don’t know—it’s been a nice business for me in that I’ve had work… I mean, I don’t think I’m a prime example of a good entrepreneur because I never really built my business. I just let things come to me and did what came along, and it’s kind of been a good gig. Sometimes I regret that I wasn’t more assertive, but I was busy with municipal politics or whatever, and I did have a few good clients who came back to me regularly, so I, you know, I had the work. And it’s changed over time, too, a little bit. There was a time I did a lot of training manuals for different things.
IC: That’s how I know your name!
VS: [Laughs.]
IC: Would you say… I mean, I guess the whole tone of this conversation is still a bit of skepticism, still a little bit of pessimism in terms of where the movement was or is. But what would you say some of the most important events were during the period of, you know, 1980-ish to 1995-ish that were socially or culturally or politically important to plain language in Canada?
VS: Well, I think there were these gatherings. I don’t think they were always annual, but there was one in Calgary, there was one in Vancouver, I think there was one in Victoria. Maybe one in Toronto. So there were… I’m sort of blurring in my mind where I travelled for what thing. But I mean there were times people got together so at least there was a sense of community in a way.
But I think also in Canada—and I’m not trying to be critical, I’m just trying to look back—the public legal education community, so Manitoba Public Legal Education or BC… And BC always had sort of Legal Services and People’s Law School—like, there were sort of multiple players. No criticism, just saying there were. And there was, you know, Alberta Legal Resource Centre and the Calgary Law Information or whatever. So there were all these different players, and they competed for money a bit. They competed for identity. I think they did good work, but that was different from the consultants like me who were individually looking for contracts. And now, like, I’ve gone to the PLAIN international conference, and there’s a certain… you know, we’re competitors in a way. I don’t feel like a competitor because I just don’t feel like I’m chasing the big contracts or anything.
So I think there’s a sort of fractured part to how things evolved, and there’s not necessarily… I mean, and this is a whole other topic, there’s not even a shared sense of how to do it well and and—dare I say—who’s doing it best, or whether there is a best.
I saw dialogue script the other day that I just went, ”Really? You think that people can understand this?” So, you know, it’s kind of judgmental that way. And we’ve never ever as a movement embraced testing as we should because it’s expensive and it’s another area of research. We’re writers, we’re not evaluators, although, you know, I did get involved in some testing. But we’ve never fulfilled that part of the… if plain language involves, like, researching your audience, writing for your audience, testing with your audience—I think a lot of people just write.
And I think it’s partly because there’s not the money there. There hasn’t been the financial imperative to make it work because if you think how much money a bank, for instance, will spend on their advertising or their website—and I’m not saying they shouldn’t because they need to, and all the sort of iterations and websites—do they spend that much on their mortgage documents? Absolutely not. Don’t even think about it. And they could. But they don’t.
And I mean I did do plain language mortgage documents for the Canadian Bankers Association, so there was knowledge that this could be done. And I think there are some improvements, but I don’t think they invested the same way they invested… and frankly, it’s complicated, right? When you’re testing a message in an ad and some imagery in an ad, it’s not the same as testing a 20-page mortgage document saying, “What did you get out of this? What do you think your obligations are, and what if this happened? What does this contract say?”
IC: Right. Yeah, I do notice that there’s… well, there’s more opportunities to do testing now because of different ways technology lets us do testing, but there does seem to be this lack of knowledge or experience or, really, guidance in terms of doing more rigorous testing.
VS: Even valuing it as a part of the process. I mean, it does leave you vulnerable, right? You show it to other people, and they might not like it. You struggled to do what you thought was right, and someone can say, “I don’t understand this. What is that word?”
IC: And your clients have mostly been government or private or…
VS: Not-for-profits, I’d say. National not-for-profits. I did quite a bit of work during a time period for the Canadian National Institute for the Blind, and I do quite a bit of work for the Canadian Bar Association, so it’s even within the industry. Like, I’m not even really doing stuff for the public. I’m doing stuff within the industry that… various pieces that are helpful. And I’ve done some government work, too.
IC: So that’s interesting that not-for-profits do see plain language as enough of a priority that they would hire outside consultation to do kind this work.
VS: You know, to be frank, I think they just hired me as a fairly expensive writer because they liked the product. And I had good relations with people, and, you know, all those customer service things—got it done promptly, listened well to their comments and integrated them, understood their own cultural realities. So, you know, with CNIB, I just had a really good relationship with one particular person. Canadian Bar Association, I’ve worked with different people. But those would be two big not-for-profits. And then some agencies. I did quite a bit of work for Health Canada for a while.
It’s very dependent. I mean, as I say, I wasn’t a good entrepreneur, so it was really people remembered me and asked me to do something. And often they come to you—that’s the other thing—they thought they could produce the document internally, right? They thought, “Oh, so-and-so will write this,” and then they realize, “Ugh. No. it’s not going to be OK.” But they’ve already passed their deadlines to get it out, so there isn’t a lot of time for much except kind of addressing the major flaws in the document and trying to get it right. Or better. I always talk about better. I never think a plain language document is perfect. It’s always just making it better.
And that’s an ongoing process, and it changes over time with people’s knowledge of a situation, too. You know, people know more about landlord–tenant relations now, I think, so you don’t have to explain some of the fundamental pieces. They want to cut right to the chase. When can I go to the rental board? Can my landlord evict me for this?
So I think there are ways in which we’re more sophisticated, maybe? But not on everything.
IC: Right. And I guess the other side to that is we have so much information now that we really need to drill down to what people want.
VS: Yeah. And what they need. And, you know, I think in a way too—and I might be wrong about this; it’s just a thought that’s popped in my head—but I think we’ve got more centralization of corporations, so… I’ll give you an example: I rented a car last week, and I was renting it with two other people, and we were supposed to meet at a certain time. They didn’t get there, so I just gave my driver’s license, which was the point, and left my credit card and left. And they had this deal now that you can prepay your gas, so you can bring it back to where it was or you pay a certain… it was very confusing, actually. And, like, 88 cents or $1.93—like, it’s a really big gap. Anyway, it doesn’t really matter, but I went to… Just on impulse, I went to pick up the bill, because I was worried my friends had actually slipped in their credit card and paid, because, you know, I’d said I’d pay for various reasons—that’s really a long story—but there was $54 for gas, and I know that my friends filled it up before they brought it back, and they were sort of… they just sort of waived it.
And this is really my point: I think a lot of companies, they don’t care what the language is. If you complain they just will make it right, because it’s easier to make it right. I know it’s not true about the, you know, mobile phone companies—it’s a big mess—but even they have an association, a third-party association, to mediate disputes with cellphone providers, so I just wonder if some of the anger that might have been generated about unfair contracts is just managed through paying off people who whine. That’s really where my story was going. Because she had no problem, “Oh, we’ll just take that off. It might take a couple of days. That’s all right.” You know. But it was clearly a ripoff—like, a $55 plus tax ripoff—because we didn’t agree to that, I don’t think. And she certainly didn’t fight.
IC: Interesting. So we would be missing that kind of grassroots anger that you were mentioning because companies are finding different ways of appeasing their client base.
VS: Yes. Yep, yeah. Or you can call a number or you can do live chat with someone if you don’t understand something, so you can get your information that way if you want to. Yeah, I wonder whether that’s happening in the marketplace, because I do think there haven’t been a lot of improvements, but there’s not a lot of upset. In my world, anyway. There are not a lot of expectations. People’s expectations are quite low. “Oh, it’s a legal contract—they won’t understand.”
IC: When I was first introduced to plain language, there were the social justice aspects of it, the right to understand aspects of it, and then there were the, you know, economic arguments that companies that pursue plain language initiatives save more money, they don’t get as many customer complaints, and they get more customer compliance and that kind of stuff. So what you’re suggesting is that that part of the equation is almost obviated by…
VS: I don’t know, I mean Joe Kimble wrote that Writing for Dollars or whatever book, and I think, I mean, there are those examples of the Veterans Affairs Administration in the States where it seemed like they did… as soon as they put the right information at the top of their letters, they stopped getting a hundred phone calls a day about them, so it does have an economic benefit. But maybe, I don’t know, maybe… Like, you know how they say we don’t have a middle class anymore—there’s either rich or poor—and, you know, a lot of politicians are speaking to try to rebuild the middle class? Well, I’m also wondering about that corporately. We either have small businesses that are willing to do what they can to make their customers happy, and it’s not really… Or we have these large corporations that can just buy people off, and so there’s not… Something’s different than the way it was in Britain in 1960s or ’70s when things ignited, if you want.
IC: And in a way, if it’s a “squeaky wheel gets the grease”–type situation that you were mentioning, then it’s rather undemocratic because it means the rules aren’t fairly applied.
VS: Oh, absolutely, which means we’re back where we started 40 years ago about why I went to law school, to give people… because it was a social justice issue. But I don’t know. Like, it’s just a funny time politically and maybe I’m extrapolating from my little tiny corner of Ontario and it’s not true in Vancouver where there are people who are more militant about understanding a document or there are greater expectations maybe in Nova Scotia that the government will tell them information in language they can understand.
And, I mean, certainly at the regulatory side, there are people who are working as plain language drafters in some jurisdictions in Canada.
IC: So the reason I know your name is the training manuals you talked about, so one of my questions here is what were your main roles and activities in the plain language movement, and are there any accomplishments related to the movement that you’re especially proud of? And so I’m hoping you’ll talk a little bit about those training materials that you created.
VS: Well, I don’t know which ones you’re referring to, but I’ll tell you a sort of personal story about them. So I had been doing some work for Environment Canada—I think maybe I’d written one of their annual reports for the Canadian Environmental Protection Act, which is… I mean, is that a plain language project, or is that just… I have friends who write annual reports for corporations all the time. Anyway, but I had done that, and I had done some other stuff for them, and they asked me if I would write a training manual on a particular new act that was coming in, and I went to see someone at the college in Kingston to say, “You know, I don’t know anything about adult education—what should I be thinking about?” And that got me going into doing an adult education diploma at the college. In part, like… It’s a bit more complicated because I actually took a course on how to do PowerPoint, I think, and that was part of the adult education program—like “teaching adults,” they called it, and it sort of morphed into taking courses. So personally some of the manual work led me to be more interested in how adults learn, as a little project I did over a few years going back to school. I mean, did you see the training manuals I did for CNIB, or the training manuals I did for Environment Canada? Because I did a few. I did one on PCB regulations and one on the Wild Animal and Plant Protection Act. I didn’t do thousands of them. Again, I used to say I was a bit of a prostitute…
IC: [Laughs]
VS: You know, whatever people wanted me to do, I would do, and I didn’t really see myself as a specialist in any of those things or market myself. I would say I do forms design because I’d done a few forms. [Pauses.] But, I don’t quite know what you’re looking for.
IC: Mm-hm. Well it’s more the methods of plain language. You know, people are always looking for rules and checklists and all that stuff. And I think your name is in the government document Plain Language Clear and Simple, I think?
VS: It might be. [Laughs.]
IC: You might have been consulting about that? Yeah, a lot of the people that I’ve been talking to, you know, they take a stance. You know, they practise plain language, but they also step back and view plain language as—I don’t want to say more scientifically but more methodically, right, where they do the literacy courses and the adult education and gather all of this evidence-based background on how to better communicate with people.
VS: Yeah, I did some of that. I certainly haven’t done as much as many people practising in the field have done. There was something I wanted to say when we were talking about different… how different people approach it. I mean, the thing with the training manuals was that we’re really bringing in experiential learning, which isn’t necessarily a plain language writing strategy. It links, though, to how to make acquiring information meaningful to people and have some resonance and have some lasting retention. So for me, plain language is about presenting information in a way that people can understand it and use it and work with it, and training manuals sort of take that to the next level because you’re doing a course for a week and you want it to be not just someone droning on. You want it to have opportunities to practise or to engage, and, I mean, that’s where I translated my adult education into the work I was doing in training manuals. I was trying to do as much as possible to think about, OK, how do you take the 12 people that are in this room and make this stuff about how you get snakes in drug shipments and what do you do about them and how do you handle them and who do you call and all sorts of things. So it’s always practical. I guess if I could put it in a nutshell, a lot of the work is the practical application of information for useful purposes.
IC: Right. It sounds fascinating—the material that you get to read and work with.
VS: Well, it’s certainly always different. That’s one of the things I’ve enjoyed about being a consultant is the work is challenging. It’s like a good crossword puzzle or something. You have to sort of figure out what you’re going to do with this, and it’s always different. You know, it’s not rote.
IC: Right. You mentioned that various public legal education organizations around Canada were sort of competing with each other and doing their own thing and a little bit fractured, but then you also mentioned PLAIN as an international organization. So do you think the community was more cohesive at that international level than maybe it was in the country?
VS: [Laughs.] I would say at the international level, there’s a higher degree of professionalism, like, there… That’s why I’m sort of nervous about saying that. But I think there’s some outstanding researchers, writers, thinkers, lawyers looking at things from a more rigorous perspective, and I think at the local level, people are doing what they can get project money to do—or this was the case in the past, anyway—or doing what they’ve always done. We need to do dial-a-law script or we need a new booklet on this or the government’s just passing this new legislation and will give us money to do that. So I think they’re more focused on meeting their administrative need and the government need and maybe less attentive to some of the learning that’s gone on, you know, about learning, maybe. But I don’t know if that’s fair. It’s a big generalization, and I really don’t know the players anymore. I mean, I think I’m a peripheral party to the plain language party in Canada. I know the players, but I don’t connect on a regular basis kind of thing.
IC: OK. Fair. Let’s see my questions here… What were the biggest challenges in the plain language movement before the mid-1990s? You sort of touched on that in terms of the lack of a grassroots push for plain language.
VS: Yeah, and I think the lack of guarantee of money. Like, it’s interesting. So one of my other things is land trusts—that’s why I was here [visiting Toronto, from Kingston]. On land trust business. So I know the Edmonton Land Trust got, like, a $2-million-dollar endowment from the City of Edmonton to run, so they know that they can always have… like, they’re generating income or grants from that revenue, and I don’t mean to name names, but that never happened in the plain language world as far as I know. No one sort of got told, “We know we’re gonna need you forever. We know that we need to translate government legislation in a way that governments can’t do, ’cause governments are always going to be forced to be a little bit more stuffy or whatever, pretty much, so we’re gonna need a Plain Language Manitoba or whatever, and therefore here is a chunk of money that’s gonna be in your budget every year, and organize yourselves accordingly.” So, I mean, you could say that would be very bureaucratic and entrenched, but I think it also would have meant that there could have been more consistency. But the government’s not paying for stuff like that, right? It’s leaving it to the not-for-profit sector to figure out what it can deliver with cobbling together this grant and that grant and this benefactor’s ”I’d like to do something on this” or whatever.
IC: So there’s a lack of leadership, you think?
VS: I’m not in a position to judge that. I think I’m more comfortable saying there’s lack of momentum. And I think also you know the Canadian Bar Association and the Canadian Bankers Association put out this Gobbledy-gook book, you know, in 1980-something, and, I mean, what happened with that? Like, so, it’s just never been a priority. A real priority.
IC: Right. It sounds as though in the period that I was looking at, there were a few key people who were pushing for plain language initiatives and then sort of expecting that maybe it would catch on and then that would be the status quo from that point forward, but it never actually really caught on.
VS: Yeah, gelled. And then, I mean, there’s a word for the political realities that are outside the parameters of what you’re doing. I mean, there was a lot of… A lot of different things happened and certainly a change of government, with less liberal ideas about informing the public, for one thing, and then generally maybe a public that was more self-absorbed and didn’t really—well, we’ve sort of covered that ground—demand more. But also just maybe… I feel there’s a certain amount of disempowerment that’s gone on in the last 20 years generally, and it’s sort of… I’m really digesting that. Like, a lot of things that we did in the ’70s and ’80s and ’90s—and I often reference this in conversation—like, around sexual assault, you know, getting rape out of the Criminal Code, getting penetration out of the Criminal Code, having it being sexual touching and sexual assault, you know, like, aggravated sexual assault. It’s made no difference, you know? We still have judges saying obnoxious things to women. We still have the police not following up. And, like, maybe it’s better. Maybe an individual person who’s been attacked gets a slightly more respectful treatment in a police station, but I don’t see society-wise…
So I sort of… I’m looking back and going, “What could we have done differently? Should we have not cared about the words in the Criminal Code and worked harder on something other”… And that’s just one example of things…
Yeah, I was just talking to someone who actually just hired me to do a small job, and he’s talking about how there’s gonna be a pamphlet to explain marijuana to parents and children, and I mean he wrote one like that 30 years ago for Health Canada, you know, and it’s the same thing back again. Like, is this what it means to get older? You just see the loop? You know, is it just a circle, or is it, you know, is it a loop that sort of goes somewhere?
I mean, there has been progress in society—I’m not saying there hasn’t—but I think plain language is one of those examples. Good idea, makes sense, but hasn’t coalesced.
IC: All right. So here’s a tough question. What do you think we could do now given the climate, given this disempowerment that you’ve identified, that regular people maybe aren’t in a position or don’t really want to do that push. How about the rest of us who are within the community and feel strongly about plain language. What can we do to advocate for the advancement of this movement?
VS: I’m laughing at myself, because as I was talking… I’ve always been opposed to this kind of… that there’s a course that you take and then you’re an expert. Or that there’s a certification for plain language writers. Because I just think it’s just a boondoggle of… diversion away from the task at hand. Not really anything you could control. I mean, I’ve been, you know, I can graduate with my adult education teaching adults certificate—does that mean I’m a good adult educator? [Does a raspberry.] I’ve gone back to school to go do mediation work—does that mean I can mediate successfully? So why would it be any different in plain language, just because you’ve taken a few courses? Does that entitle you…
So, you know, I say all that and then I think, well, maybe if we had done that… Like, Sweden, they have that very serious academic approach, and they seem to have way more plain language happening, including plain language in—and Finland, too—like, very simple documents with lots of design and government done, just to help people know what’s what. So in a way, maybe if it was formalized, then people would take it more seriously, because it was an academic course, and you could say to a lawyer, “I have been, you know, I have a certificate from the University of Toronto in clear communication and therefore…”
So I’m torn about that, because I don’t really believe in it, but then sometimes you have to be realistic and say maybe that’s what the system needs. That would force the issue with the powers that be. And, you know, I don’t know—maybe we should be writing letters to the editor more often as sort of random pieces to The Globe and Mail to say, “Hey, I just read this piece of legislation that Ontario put out and it’s incomprehensible garbage.”
IC: Do you think plain language legislation would help? That idea’s sort of been floating around for decades.
VS: Well, there’s another thing I’ve never been a big fan of. I mean, I’m a fan of it because I think everyone would benefit, but I don’t think for a moment that when you have a landlord–tenant problem you’re going to the legislation. You’re going to your friends, you’re going to a neighbour who’s had the experience, you’re going to a, you know, a community group that has someone who knows about it. That’s how you figure out what to do, I think. So the legislation is, like, the last place you’re going to look. Even me. [Laughs] So no, I just think plain language legislation would be helpful because it would… a lot of the tools in plain language, like, having a good table of contents, having good side bars that are not just, you know, whatever… I’m forgetting the legal word when it’s sort of “same as the paragraph before.” Well, you know, it’s not the same or it wouldn’t be here, so what is it really saying?
So I think that would be helpful, but I don’t think that’s what’s going to strengthen the movement. I don’t think that’s what’s gonna make a difference. I don’t know. Do you have thoughts?
IC: I don’t know! I teach in the plain language certificate program at SFU, so I guess I have a conflict there. [Laughs] I would like to believe that I’m contributing and making some positive difference. But I mean, I think you’re right—a lot of it must come down to what people are demanding, and as long as people continue to get more busy and they recognize that having information quickly accessible and usable is to their advantage and we push for that, then I don’t know where we’d be.
VS: Yeah, and, you know, if some company made a real commitment and then got business because of that commitment, like, “Deal with us and you’ll understand everything about what we’re doing with your money” or whatever, then maybe that would also, like, be competitive. It’s a competitive marketplace, and that would differentiate you in the marketplace, and quickly people would follow it.
But I also wonder if it’s kind of… We’ve sort of been living with this myth that people want information. You know, I think unless they’re in a difficult situation, like, arrested or car accident and, you know, don’t know who’s going to pay the bill, or whatever, maybe it’s not a necessity.
IC: [Laughs.] OK.
VS: So I do… you know, you catch me at a funny time, because I feel—like, I said about sexual assault, which I’ve been thinking about, like, where did that go astray? There are a lot of things that seem to be less dynamic, less energy… Like certainly at the municipal level, like, I’m quite active at my municipality, and it’s pretty ugly, and there’s maybe an attempt to say, “We want to engage the public”—oh we’ve just had a big consultation about the Kingston Penitentiary property. Someone I know who was visiting me dared to say, “It’s the best piece of undeveloped real estate in Canada that’s waterfront—of course it’s going to be developed.” And I’m, like, you know, it’s an 1830s prison that has these buildings and a history and we’re gonna tear them all down so we can put high-rises by the water and privatize this public space? But my point really is, they’ve had consultation meetings over the winter about what to do and then at the end of the day, they say, “Well, this is what people wanted. They want these two 25-storey towers.” It’s not what people wanted. What they didn’t want was the eight towers along this part of the street, so, you know, it’s not like people said, “This is what we wanted” or even “This is what we’re willing to compromise.” And I think there’s a lot of manipulation. And certainly Kingston’s had another project—these are all planning issues which I’m sort of interested in—but the whole community devised a kind of guideline for how development should go on a particular ten blocks in Kingston, let’s say. Midtown—so not right downtown but not the suburbs at all. And those guidelines have been on the books for three, four years, and someone’s coming in and blowing them up. You know, “No, I want to do this, and I want to do this” and it’s of course more height, more mass, less parking. And again, people are being dismissed as, “Oh, you’re just the same old people who complain,” but what happens to all those people that work for two years to come up with those guidelines—went to meetings, had discussions, and now they’re just ignored. Like, they’re not gonna go to a meeting again. So, anyway, I don’t know what that has to do with plain language, but I think it has to do with my mood. [Laughs]
Which might be more negative than necessary, because I do think there are changes—like, I do think… As I said, I got something from an insurance company that really was quite nicely done, and so I do think there is effort out there. It’s not like we’re at zero.
IC: Right. But it’s just not an organized effort.
VS: Yeah, it doesn’t feel organized, it doesn’t feel cohesive, it doesn’t feel dynamic, it doesn’t feel like it’s the zeitgeist of the industries that deal with people with paper—that they feel this commitment to do it properly or well or to the best of our ability now that we know what works and what doesn’t work. Because that’s the sort of thing—we’re using old technology, right? We don’t use old technology with our smartphones, but we’re using old technology with our writing.
IC: Mm-hm.
VS: And then in some ways, the next generation is just like they’re texting and they’re shortening words and they’re communicating in their own way, so maybe that’s another part of it—that attention to detail and grammar and speaking well are not really going to be valued in 20 years. You know. I see a lot of “mistakes” that an English teacher from 30 years ago would freak out about that are just common now, and a lot of people don’t proofread what they write—they don’t care—so… But the lawyer in me says, “Oooh, alarm bells! That’s not good.” Language is important and precision is important and mistakes can be costly if you’re communicating about something life or death–ish.
IC: Right.
VS: I don’t know. I think Quebec is doing OK. I think Quebec is trying hard and that in Quebec there is a bit more government support and recognition. And it sounds like BC is still… you know, BC was always kind of a leader because there were a lot of different players, and it was seen as an access-to-justice issue in BC. Whereas in other places it might have been seen as a poverty issue but not as an access-to-justice issue. I don’t know—it’s hard, because I’m sort of… what was it like in 1990 and what is different now, and I don’t have a good grasp of it. Like, in many ways, although I still practise plain language work, I’ve done so many other things that I never really… I never really became only engaged in plain language work.
IC: Fair enough.
VS: Yeah, so. Discard everything I’ve said. [Laughs]
IC: Well, I don’t want to keep you from your show.
VS: Oh, that’s OK—I was going to go back to your list of questions because… the ones you forwarded to me because I was wondering if there were things I wanted to talk about. [A few moments of silence.]
Yeah, I guess, I mean, people have talked to you about the People’s Law Conference, right—that Mark MacGuigan organized? Because that was really the birth of the Department of Justice’s public legal education efforts, and that’s why when the Liberals were unelected in 1984 and Mulroney came in, they weren’t sure what was going to happen with the program, and that’s why I said, you know, I had a two-month contract and then a three-month contract, and then it did… then that government was willing to sort of keep on. So I think that that People’s Law Conference was very… might have been sort of like the British People’s Plain Language or Plain Campaign or Plain English or whatever. So that might have been politically important.
But again, those things… that’s interesting. Vancouver has a very active community foundation, right, and we have a very active community foundation in Kingston. Like, it’s growing, you know—your assets in Vancouver are, like, 200 million billion dollars or something—like you’ve got a really big pool. But I was looking at the grants that our community foundation funded, and it was it was like a flashback, again, because when I was younger, there were local initiative programs, like, LIP grants, and every year the government had a sort of money-to-the-community program. They have none now, right? They don’t do any of that sort of community… “You need some money to do something that you think is meaningful and here’s a few bucks to make it happen.” But the community foundation is doing it. So it’s still being done. Smaller amounts. Way smaller amounts. But still giving people with a vision of something different—an opportunity to explore it. But I just… times were really different in the ’80s, right?
IC: Right. So you see an offloading in responsibility from government to nonprofits or…
VS: Absolutely. For everything. In land conservation. And in health promotion. Yeah. And in community support—projects that are good in the community. Yep.
Um… I was just I thinking. [A few moments of silence.] I think there are—just when you ask what I’m proud of—I think there are individual pieces of work I’m proud of, but I don’t think they’re relevant at a national level or anything. They’re just… I mean, I think that’s one of the nice things about the work. Sometimes you do something, you think, “That was effective and the product is beautiful” or “There was good content here that made a difference.” So I don’t feel like my career is wasted or anything [laughs] even though, you know, I might feel that the movement, like, had I given more attention to the movement, would it be different? Had we in the ’80s sort of said, “OK, you know, in 2020, we want to see X, Y, and Z.” Because we never set goals like that—everybody was living year to year.
IC: Do you think that was unique to Canada, or generally?
VS: I don’t know—the grass is always greener, right? You sort of have the feeling in Australia, they had more of a vision. And I don’t know, maybe it’s just the six people that you hear doing the stuff they do, and I think a lot of people just chase the projects, either personally, like, you know, I chase the contracts. Or, as a plain language public legal education group, chase the next project that meant they could keep the core administrative body going. So that’s… I don’t know. What do you think it’s gonna be in 20 years?
IC: I don’t have a clear idea. But I’m working in health now—I’m doing my PhD in health sciences, and we’re looking at implementation science—so how do you get research knowledge implemented in a clinical setting. And to me, communication is a big part of that, and so funders really want to squish the time between research knowledge being discovered and being implemented, and in order to do that effectively, we, as you say, we know what to do—we have all of these decades’ worth of adult education, cognitive science that tells us how to communicate effectively, and it’s a really a matter of applying it. And maybe if governments see the value of doing that in a health context—I mean, everything is health now. With the social determinants of health being more and more of a concept, you know, poverty is health, education is health—and if we can extend that to beyond health, maybe there is going to be some more money, some investment in making that communication a little more smooth. I don’t know.
VS: Yeah, maybe. [Laughs] It’s a good concept. And maybe that’s it. Maybe we focus too much on law for plain language and should have focused on these other areas that are more closely related to people… I mean law is in your everyday life all the time, but you don’t really run afoul of it all that much. And maybe if we had focused on things that were more… like your grocery shopping or something, you know, plain language labels or whatever, there would have been more pickup. And the focus has always been on that margin of legality. So, yes, it’s possible. So what do you think the people you’re training at school are going to do? Who are taking your program?
IC: Well, some of them already work in health, so a lot of them are just trying to find better ways of communicating with patients. And then I was just… the reason I’m in Toronto is I was at a conference about patient engagement in health and patient-oriented research. And so we’re getting to a point now where in order for research to be relevant to the people that it’s supposed to help, we need to involve patients in every part of the research process. So they need to tell us what they would like researched, and we would like patients to be involved in designing the study, carrying out the study, analyzing the results, interpreting and also disseminating the information after it’s all done. And really what I took out of this conference that I was just at is that if we’re expecting patients to help us do literature reviews, that literature has to be understandable to them.
VS: That’s a big, tall order.
IC: Yeah.
VS: Although some people… it’s, you know, in the specialty sides when you have a child with a special illness, you do become quite expert—there are a lot of experts. You know what, it’s interesting, because in my land trust world, in my conservation world, everything has moved towards citizen science.
IC: Mm-hm.
VS: And so here I’m talking about disempowerment, like how the city has disempowered all these people who contributed to these plans for the city, and then at the same time, the other… the sort of yin and yang of that is that there’s all these efforts to, you know, patients to do a literature review and citizens to show where the turtles have gone and where they’re nesting and count how many eggs they had or whatever, I mean that’s where all the money is. TD Friends of the Environment Fund—that’s what they’re funding is citizen science, not any of the other more traditional actions that people took. So, curious. Maybe we’re just too close. Can’t see the forest.
IC: Well, thank you so much for taking the time.
VS: Oh, you’re very welcome. My pleasure. It’s always interesting to talk and reflect.