Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Chairman, esteemed colleagues, it may come as somewhat of a surprise to you, but I fully support my colleague Guimond on this point, despite his marked capacity for hiding his good humour most of the time. I support him 100 per cent.
My colleague Mr. Reid made a reference to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. While I have no desire whatsoever to minimize the Charter's import, I would like to remind him that we are in the process of voting on our committee's internal rules of procedure. The committee would not be allowed to consider a document that hadn't been translated. We're not saying that witnesses must translate their submissions.
I'm very surprised by Mr. Reid's comments. To my knowledge, each time a witness is summoned to appear before a House committee, our staff, be it the clerks or the research officers, explain clearly that if the witness wishes to table a brief or some other document, it must be bilingual. The witness is advised that if he cannot table his brief in both languages, arrangements can be made to have the document translated, provided the witness supplies a copy in advance.
I chaired the Legislative Committee on Bill C-38 and that's how we always went about our business. Naturally, the committee did encounter some problems. For example, one time a witness submitted a 185-page brief 18 hours prior to testifying before the committee and that caused a bit of a problem.
The fact remains that I'm extremely surprised by Mr. Reid's comments. To my knowledge, the standard rule is that documents are systematically tabled in bilingual format. Therefore, I don't see why we wouldn't adopt this standard.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.