We have conducted a study jointly with my provincial colleagues, the Commissioner of Official Languages in New Brunswick, and the French Language Services Commissioner in Ontario, on the language capacity of federal courts. We've had a great deal of collaboration from the chief justices in the six provinces that we've looked at. We have a preliminary draft of that study.
I gave an initial presentation to the winter meeting of the Canadian Bar Association in Mont-Tremblant in February. We will be presenting the final report to the Canadian Bar Association in Saskatoon in August.
We are basically looking at the following: What is the process used to evaluate the capacity of nominees to the judiciary to be able to conduct a trial in the minority language? What should those criteria be? What is an appropriate level for designation? It's a study that looks at how the language skills are evaluated for those judges who play a critical role and how the judiciary evaluates its own linguistic capacity.