Well, there are several issues.
I am somewhat worried about the use of French in the public service. There has been a lot of progress and there are more and more bilingual positions. People meet the minimum linguistic requirements for these positions. Nevertheless, I see that work is generally done in English even in departments that are bilingual in nature. There has to be leadership and we have to lead by example. This responsibility is incumbent upon anglophones and francophones. Everyone has to show leadership, particularly my francophone colleagues who hesitate to use French in important discussions. I try to encourage them to do so, because even if it takes 30 seconds more to intervene on an issue, it is worth it. It is also worth it for our anglophone colleagues who can learn French in this way.
By not using French on a regular basis, we are impoverishing that language in the public service and people wind up no longer knowing certain terms and acronyms. We refer to them in English and we always wind up using that language. This is an important issue to my mind.
In my role at the Public Service Commission of Canada, I would like to review some of our methods of evaluating language proficiency. With new technology we can do much more interesting things and find ways of encouraging people to keep up their skills once they have reached the required linguistic levels.
I would also like to explore how we could recruit more young people who graduate from French language immersion programs and then go on to university courses. When they have completed their studies, there is no real way to recruit them and encourage them to become public servants. There are several things we could do to reach them, and I can assure you that this would be a priority for me.