Signs Nobody Can Read: The NDP's Performative Bilingual Sign Blitz

Pull up to a park in Vancouver. Read the new bilingual sign at the entrance. Can you read the second line? Can anyone around you read it? Could you find a single person in the parking lot who knows what it says?

If you answered no — congratulations, you've just experienced BC NDP reconciliation policy in action.

Across British Columbia, the provincial and municipal governments are spending millions of taxpayer dollars installing bilingual signs on streets, parks, buildings, and public infrastructure. The signs pair English with an Indigenous language — typically the language traditionally spoken by the First Nation whose territory the location sits on.

In theory, this sounds like a reasonable act of cultural recognition. In practice, it raises a question the NDP absolutely does not want you to ask: who is this for?

The Language Nobody Speaks

Take Vancouver. The city sits on the traditional territory of three First Nations: the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. Their languages — hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Snichim, and səlilwətaɬ — are now appearing on signage across the region.

These are real languages with real histories, spoken by real people for thousands of years. Nobody disputes that. But here's what the NDP's press releases conveniently leave out: these languages are critically endangered.

To get an accurate translation of a sign into hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓, you need a linguist. A specialist. Someone with years of academic training in a language with no mass media presence, no commercial software support, and vanishingly few living fluent speakers. We looked into adding the language to a website recently — and were told the same thing: you need an expert.

Signage Has a Purpose

Signs exist to communicate. Street signs tell you where you are. Park signs tell you what the rules are. Wayfinding signs help you navigate. The entire point of a sign is that people can read it.

When the BC NDP adds a second language to public signage, they are implicitly claiming that a meaningful portion of the public either speaks that language or benefits from seeing it. That's the justification for French-English bilingual signs in New Brunswick, where roughly 33% of the population speaks French as a first language. It's the justification for Mandarin on signage in Richmond, where a large portion of residents are native Mandarin speakers.

What's the justification in Vancouver, where fewer than a dozen people speak hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ as a first language?

It isn't communication. It's symbolism. And symbolism paid for with your tax dollars.

The Cost Nobody Talks About

The NDP doesn't publish a single consolidated figure for what British Columbia is spending on Indigenous language signage — which should tell you something. But the costs are real and they accumulate fast:

• Sign fabrication and installation — bilingual signs cost significantly more to produce than standard signs, requiring custom typography for orthographies that use characters not found in standard fonts
• Translation fees — accurate translations into endangered Indigenous languages require paid linguists and community consultation processes, not a free online tool
• Replacement of existing signage — municipalities are pulling down perfectly functional signs and replacing them, not just adding plaques
• Ongoing maintenance — larger, more complex signs cost more to maintain and replace over time
• City and provincial staff time — coordinating these programs requires dedicated bureaucratic capacity

Multiply this across hundreds of parks, streets, government buildings, and highways across the province, and you're looking at a program that costs tens of millions of dollars — with zero measurable impact on the actual survival of these languages.

Does It Even Help the Languages?

Here's the most damning question of all: does any of this actually help preserve or revitalize Indigenous languages?

Language revitalization experts are nearly unanimous: signage doesn't save languages. Languages survive through intergenerational transmission — parents speaking to children at home, immersive education programs, community use in daily life. A sign on a park bench does essentially nothing for a language's survival.

Welsh is one of the great success stories of language revitalization in the modern world. Wales brought Welsh back from the brink not through street signs, but through Welsh-medium schools, Welsh-language television and radio, government services delivered in Welsh, and decades of sustained community investment. Today, over 800,000 people speak Welsh — roughly 29% of Wales' population.

BC's First Nations languages have none of those structural supports at scale. The NDP's answer is a sign outside a park that an elder linguist has to be called in to verify is even correctly spelled.

Who Actually Benefits?

Walk through the logic. The sign is unreadable to 99.9% of the public. It does not meaningfully preserve the language. It costs significant taxpayer money. And the communities whose languages are being used? Many of them would rather see that money go toward actual language programs — elders-in-residence, youth immersion, digital archiving, community centres.

So who benefits from the signs?

The NDP benefits. David Eby's government gets to stand in front of a newly unveiled sign, smile for the camera, and call it reconciliation. It generates press releases, photo opportunities, and talking points. It signals virtue without requiring the hard, expensive, unglamorous work of actually rebuilding living language communities.

It is, in the most precise sense of the term, performative.

Respect Doesn't Require Illegibility

None of this means Indigenous cultures and languages don't deserve recognition. They absolutely do. The question is whether this particular form of recognition — expensive, unreadable, photographable signs — is the best use of limited public resources, or whether it's a political aesthetic dressed up as policy.

A government that genuinely respected Indigenous languages would ask Indigenous communities: what would actually help your language survive? The answer, overwhelmingly, is not a sign on a park bench that even a university linguistics department struggles to translate accurately.

BC taxpayers deserve reconciliation that actually reconciles something — not a province-wide art installation that makes politicians look good while languages quietly die.