OPSEU/SEFPO is multilingual

Ram4change.ca is now available in French, Tamil, Arabic, Cantonese, and Hindi.

Here's why.

Members told us the site should reflect OPSEU/SEFPO's bilingual status. Fair point — we're a bilingual union, and our site should reflect that.

But bilingual is the floor, not the ceiling.

Walk into any workplace in Region 5 and you'll hear Tamil, Punjabi, Cantonese, Arabic, Hindi, Tagalog. That's not diversity as a talking point — that's the reality of public services in Ontario. Our membership doesn't just speak two languages. We're multilingual.

So we didn't just add French. We added Tamil, Arabic, Cantonese, and Hindi.

Meeting this moment means building a union that actually reflects its members — not just on paper, but in practice.

What we couldn't add — yet.

We also looked for tools to translate into Indigenous languages.

OPSEU members — like all of us living on Turtle Island — are treaty partners. That relationship has to matter to us as members and to our union.

In Ontario, the most commonly spoken Indigenous languages are Ojibway (Anishinaabemowin), Oji-Cree, Cree, and Mohawk. We searched for a tech solution that would let us offer the site in these languages.

We couldn't find one.

That's frustrating. And it's not new. The historic erasure of Indigenous languages didn't end when residential schools closed — it is an ongoing harm that continues to this day.

We're naming it because pretending it doesn't exist isn't an option.

If you have resources, community contacts, or ideas for how we can do better — we want to hear from you at ram4change.ca/contact