At Home with the Hansard

In the US we’ve got the Congressional Record. In Canada—and select other Common­wealth or ex-Common­wealth countries—they’ve got (the) Hansard. The key difference is that Hansard records what was actually said, while the Congressional Record allows you to insert what you wish you had said. Like, say, the full list of all your constituents’ pets.

Make that: Hansard records what should have been said. Not quite the same thing. Here is their boilerplate, attached to the beginning of each day’s preliminary transcript:

Hansard is not a verbatim transcript of the debates of the House. It is a transcript in extenso. In the case of repetition or for a number of other reasons, such as more specific identification, it is acceptable to make changes so that anyone reading Hansard will get the meaning of what was said. Those who edit Hansard have an obligation to make a sentence more readable since there is a difference between the spoken and the written word.

Close quote. I would like to think this means only that a certain number of hems, haws and throat-clearings will be edited out. But that’s a matter for people who follow Canadian politics more closely than I do. What’s important here is: If you are a multi­lingual country, you get a multi­lingual Hansard. This can provide hours of education and entertainment, so long as you stay away from discussions of water supplies and the crumbling infra­structure.*

Boring but necesssary disclaimer: All quotations are from the unofficial, day-to-day “blues”. If you need a Hansard for any legitimate, law-abiding purpose, you can pick up the final version at the Nunavut Govern­ment web site. The Inuktitut versions for sessions 1.2-1.5, along with the first seating of 1.6 (through March 2002) are in the legacy font Prosyl. Paste the text into the trans­coder of your choice—for shorter passages I use the one here—to convert to Unicode syllabics or Roman type. Or some approxi­mation thereof. But I’ll get to that another time.