The federal departments and institutions that are responsible need to be more vigilent. For example, the port authorities or rental agencies in airports have certain responsibilities. For the airport authorities to be able to apply the policy, they must receive a very clear message from Treasury Board.
Treasury Board has often been slow, particularly in sending a message to airport authorities when the threshold of one million passengers annually has been exceeded. They then have language obligations. It is more difficult when a third party is accountable to an institution that has some amount of autonomy from a department—as is the case for the airport authority, which has an important connection with Transport Canada, but remains independent. However, there needs to a commitment.
Service at the Macdonald-Cartier International Airport in Ottawa has greatly improved after some intervention, which I mentioned. For example, restaurants post their menus in both official languages. You can even find books in French there. Television screens alternate between French and English. So institutions that have a responsibility toward a third party need to make an extra effort.
Some airports say that they are doing renovations and that it will have to wait until the renovations are done. However, others have difficulty acknowledging their responsibilities or making announcements to passengers. We would have hoped that there would have been an information campaign for passengers on the language rights of travellers, but the airports refused our announcements. So we had to use the Internet to inform travellers of their language rights.