We're wandering a fair way from section 530 of the Criminal Code. The one thing I would suggest is that we have seen examples of deeply unfortunate incidents that arose because of great frustration on the part of an individual and a lack of comprehension of that frustration on the part of police officers who intervened.
Without wishing to cast aspersions on any of the people involved in that process, I think that as.... It should be extremely important for all police officers to have some understanding of the nature of people under stress who don't speak the officers' language. My job involves the two official languages, but there have been incidents involving people who were, not in one of the official languages, venting—smashing chairs—and bad things happened. Had there been better training on how to deal with somebody who does not have either of the official languages, a tragedy could have been avoided.
Again, we're wandering a long way from section 530, but one of the things I've always thought about the nature of official languages in Canada is that when I learned French, I felt I was a prisoner of my accent. I didn't understand the jokes. I didn't understand the cultural context. I realized that's the immigrant experience, so the process of learning French made me more sensitive to the challenges of people coming to this country with other languages and other accents. It is not a question of pitting multiculturalism against linguistic duality—those who speak other languages against those who speak French or English—but of recognizing that there's a certain sensitivity required when two languages encounter each other in a situation of tension.