Mr. Chair, it's been a long time since we've been pushing for the criterion to be there that you have to be bilingual. Yvon Godin worked very hard on this. One of the reasons was—and she's an extraordinary chief justice—that Chief Justice McLachlin, looking down at a lawyer who had pleading in French, asked him to slow down because one of the judges—and she named him—didn't understand any French. Since we both know that everything's timed in the Supreme Court, what that means is that there's an objective disadvantage when someone is told to slow down so that the translation can catch up.
Mr. Schmale's question and mine are similar, and I don't think we have an answer yet. I'd like to be able to answer people when they ask me that question: what does it mean to be functionally bilingual? The documents that have been put out by the government say it would it be an asset, just as we used to see “bilingualism an asset”, which usually meant it didn't really matter. Now the minster just used the term “positive attribute” to mean that it would be a positive attribute if you can actually speak the language. It's hard to understand how somebody can be functionally bilingual if they can't speak the language.
Maybe the minister could help us understand what that criterion is. I've worked in this area for decades now. I can tell you the criteria for members of professional orders under the Charter of the French Language, but I don't know what “functionally bilingual” means. Maybe the minister can tell us what it means to be “functionally bilingual” and what it is that might be tested, because one of our MPs just said that there might be a test associated with it.