Justice committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. The mandate of the Fédération des associations de juristes d'expression française de common law is to work in favour of access to justice in French and to promote and defend the language rights of the Francophone and Acadian communities. It represents seve

Justice committee  Without the Court Challenges Program, there won't be any progress because there will be fewer court challenges. At that point, there'll be a real chance of regressing. New statutes are passed, and some statutes can interfere with certain rights or force a regression. Ultimately,

Justice committee  As regards challenges...

Justice committee  There may be a very significant decline in the number of court challenges based on language rights. It would be important to emphasize as well that language rights, even though they often apply to individuals, are collective rights. They're for the community as a whole. When an

Justice committee  Here's the only possible answer: ultimately, the Supreme Court is the arbitrator as to whether or not an act is constitutional. It's really up to the Supreme Court to determine whether an act is constitutional or unconstitutional.

Justice committee  I'm going to turn the floor over to Christian Monnin.

Official Languages committee  Jurists take action in two areas: first, assistance for the development of language rights, that is to say finding the necessary tools to make progress in this area, but also in the justice community, and a distinction must be drawn between the two. The justice community compris

Official Languages committee  You're hitting on a very important point. Challenges are an extremely important tool for community development. We want to make demands. We all know the history of Francophones outside Quebec over the past 100 years or so. Since the Charter was passed, since section 23, we've bee

Official Languages committee  Access to justice in French has always been FAJEF's core principle. That's our starting point. Our principle is not to reduce access to justice. For a jurist, that's an essential point. We see that constitutional rights are extremely important. Having access to the courts to defe

Official Languages committee  A number of associations of French-language jurists have been in existence for a long time, including Ontario's, AJEFO, which has been around for nearly 25 years. Five years ago, the network of associations of French-language jurists was operating on a much smaller scale because

Official Languages committee  The various organizations may put forward training projects, but there's no dedicated training budget. I don't know of a lot of training projects, except for legal training in French.

Official Languages committee  Awareness and tools have been identified as priorities because, in concrete terms, jurists who want to work in French need tools, models, interpretation services and so on. All these tools are very important. Obviously, the justice sector is a bit similar to the health sector in

Justice committee  Exactly. Some judges decide to take French courses. I know some who constantly listen to their radio when they commute between work and home, so as to practise their French. Training is available, but some very highly-motivated unilingual judges have become sufficiently bilingual

Official Languages committee  There are a number of lawyers' associations, that take on different forms depending on the province. Sometimes it's a task force. Other times, there is constant communication through which, for example, they identify a particular problem in a province or region. These are unfortu

Official Languages committee  In justice, the Roadmap has enabled us to focus on what I call emerging clienteles. Seniors are a growing population, as are newcomers. In the field, the lawyers associations are receiving increasing requests from people dealing with real, genuine problems. If a man or a woman ha