Thank you, Ms. Bélanger-Richard. I greatly appreciated your presentation and the suggestion that you have made to the committee, that is to consider another way of ensuring there is bilingualism within the Supreme Court of Canada. I would like to make a few comments and hear your reaction to them afterwards.
In the past—I believe it was toward the end of the 1950s—the vast majority of universities in Canada and the United States, as well as England, required anyone wishing to obtain a bachelor of arts degree to learn another language. A great many unilingual young people enrolled in bachelor's programs and made the effort to take classes to learn a second language, in order to get their law degree.
Do you believe that it is relevant that at the Supreme Court of Canada, we require aspiring judges to be bilingual?