What we do have are examples where without this specific power being provided to the judge, no order was made, and there were, as you described, these ongoing agreements among counsel during proceedings.
The end result was that the accused at the end of a trial turns around and says “I haven't had a trial in my language”, and the Court of Appeal of Ontario, with Justice Charron, in her last judgment before she ascended to the Supreme Court, said this is wrong; this is not a bilingual trial and therefore the charges against the accused will have to be re-tried at great expense. And sometimes this becomes an impossibility in law.
So that's the type of problem we're addressing. Judges did not feel that they had the ability to deal with the issue, that they were given that discretion, so they left it up to chance, more or less. Hence, the objective, as you describe, the perhaps noble objective of bringing greater clarity, allowing these debates to take place more formally. Yes, there may be disagreements at various instances, but it would be preferable that those debates be within the context of the code's provisions rather than in the informal way we've seen them happen, which do result, in practice, in less of a bilingual trial than otherwise.