I'm not sure I said they were all functionally bilingual; I said they all had some French, and very few had no French at all, and that was right across the country. There was a French test given to ensure functional bilingualism, and not all candidates passed it. Most of them did who took it. It was actually a pleasant surprise to me. If you see the application form—Justice Rowe's is on the Internet, so it's easy to see—there were four boxes. The first two boxes represented what we would call functional bilingualism, to be able to read and understand and understand arguments in French, and then the other two were refinements of that. I think it's a reflection of an interest in learning French that has me going back to my own days as minister where one saw this growing.
Again, the Supreme Court of Canada is a unique court, but it's interesting that even in some of the regions.... For example, I am doing a project now for the University of Alberta, and in another totally different context related to that project, I met with a francophone lawyer who is the head of the Association des juristes d'expression française de l'Alberta. Many people may not know it but the University of Alberta has a francophone campus.
The interesting thing that this lawyer said was that translation isn't adequate. He said that he actually thinks he lost a case because a judge missed the nuance of an argument. He's actually had judges say to him, “I'll rely on your translation because the translator isn't very good.” I'm sure that as legal translators go, the Supreme Court of Canada has very good ones. But I think that relying on that when there is a possibility of having judges who have some functional understanding is perhaps not serving our francophone citizens the best, and they don't all come from Quebec or New Brunswick. That's what has been very interesting for me.
Lawyers have been taking on the challenge and it's quite wonderful, and, as I said, Justice Rowe is a very excellent example of that. He comes from Newfoundland. They don't have a French-speaking population, not like in New Brunswick or even in Nova Scotia where there are French-speaking communities. I think it was very encouraging for me to see that.