Indigenous Language Revitalization
Summary
The BC Indigenous Language Revitalization Program is a provincial initiative designed to preserve, protect, and restore the 34 Indigenous languages spoken across British Columbia.
In Budget 2018, BC allocated a $50-million grant to the First Peoples’ Cultural Council (FPCC) to help revitalize Indigenous languages in British Columbia.
In 2025, the BC government announced $15 million per year, ongoing, to the First Peoples’ Cultural Council to support First Nations languages, heritage, arts and cultural programming. This includes $12 million per year dedicated to addressing language revitalization.
Problem
The program is too small to justify spending millions of dollars, and success for the program has been loosely defined.
According to a 2022 First Peoples' Cultural Council fact sheet, there were 17,103 active learners of Indigenous languages in the province. In 2018, there were 13,997. Being conservative, the province spent $50 million to bring in 3,106 new active learners. This was done at $16,098/learner. In contrast, the total tuition for a four-year carpentry apprenticeship program at BCIT amounts to $4,570.
There is also no clear metric to define what a learner is. While there is a Language Status Assessment to understand, plan, and track the health of the languages, there is no direct linguistic proficiency testing to see if an Indigenous learner has become fluent.
This excessive cost per learner, combined with ambiguity surrounding those actively learning Indigenous languages, presents questions about the fiscal soundness of this policy.
Solution(s)
1: Reduce funding by 50% for the program and require quantitative measures of performance and competency
Savings = $6 million per year
or
2: Eliminate the program
Savings = $12 million per year
Read Coastal Front’s report here: