I think official languages should already be a part of everything the federal government does, and they should continue to be.
You were speaking before about whether we should be correcting.... We've had this wonderful Official Languages Act for 42 years, yet it's never been applied totally in its integrity in any government in those 42 years. Something as easy as saying “Allô, bonjour” is not being done in a lot of our federal institutions. The only thing we need to correct this is will. It's not money.
I'm a former federal employee. We used to manage the national official languages program for a crown corporation in Saskatchewan, so I'll leave you to figure out which one it was. We were able to do it. My unilingual English CEO at the time, John Ryan, received an award from the Commissioner of Official Languages, the Leon Leadership Award.
You don't need to be bilingual, and we don't expect everybody to be bilingual. I respect anybody's right to teach their children whatever language they want as long as my rights are respected as a francophone.
If we were able to win the Leon Leadership Award in Saskatchewan for official languages, I don't see any reason for our not being able to do this here now in Ottawa and across the country. As I said, all we needed was the will of one person way at the top, but over those 42 years, we have not been able to do that.
The day we start doing that, I'm going to be very proud of my Canada. If I'm already proud, I'll be even prouder.