Official Languages committee  Yes, ma'am.

Official Languages committee  I'll be very brief and then I'll turn it over to Michael. Something else that the committee has been studying, and I think you're going about it not in a direct way but in a way, is the definitions, and what it means to receive services from the federal government in an official

Official Languages committee  Exactly. The cultural aspect of translation of services is not only about part IV. Now it becomes also about part VI, about talking not to somebody who just speaks French, but talking to a francophone, talking not to somebody who just speaks English, but talking to an anglophone

Official Languages committee  I'd just like to say that it's probably the same for francophones outside Quebec. That's a minority experience. I received a speeding ticket a few years ago and I went into the cour municipale in Mont-St-Hilaire. I was nervous. I wanted to fight the ticket, because I didn't thi

Official Languages committee  No.

Official Languages committee  Thank you. I will exercise my right to do that. This seems to be a fairly simple question to answer. There is legislation requiring federally appointed judges to have reached a certain level of bilingualism. You give them a language test and it's part of the process. Getting

Official Languages committee  No, I don't have any common definitions to suggest. I will, however, point out that we had a literature review that was funded by Justice Canada. It was the beginning of a large access to justice research project that the association has now taken over. One of the aims of that pr

Official Languages committee  In our literature review, what our research was looking at was not just about courts and lawyers. It is a problem when we talk about access to justice, because the first thing people do is invite lawyers to talk about it. Of course, access to justice means alleviating poverty.

Official Languages committee  As we've said before, we support a legislative solution to effect that aim. The problem, as we see it, with having a board and having that as one of a series of criteria is that it is changeable government to government. It's an administrative “we would like to see”. It's not a l

Official Languages committee  What we have said when this question has come up before this committee in previous Parliaments is that we support legislation that requires bilingualism in Supreme Court justices without the aid of interpretation.

Official Languages committee  Right, so these are the part VI numbers that we received from Treasury Board Canada. I know that earlier last year the committee was looking for part VI figures. We got those numbers out of Treasury Board. We shared them with the analyst. We know that 2.9% of Correctional Service

Official Languages committee  If the services were available to English-speaking inmates, there wouldn't be an increased workload for the Correctional Service officers taking care of them and managing their cases. The problem right now is that, because these services aren't available, it's an exponential wor

Official Languages committee  We have no indication that it is difficult. We have no indication from our community that there is a problem receiving services from the RCMP in English in Quebec.

Official Languages committee  Not this time.

Official Languages committee  This is a very complicated issue. I want to make clear from the beginning that the leadership of the correctional service in the Quebec region was proactive in establishing a relationship with our community. They are very concerned with their linguistic responsibilities and looki