Absolutely, and I think this is where we've had a problem. I've tried to understand why we've had such a problem in dealing with the government. You know, my own interpretation now is that the government doesn't see language rights as community rights. It sees them as individual rights.
I'll give you the example of the Beaulac case. Beaulac, of course, was a guy accused of murder. He was a francophone living in Vancouver and of course he worked in English. The problem, of course, was access to a trial in French.
The decision of the court was that what you should have is a system in which anyone who comes before the court can easily decide whether they want to be judged in French or in English, provided, of course, that he speaks those languages, but the government doesn't see it that way, or didn't see that way. It saw it as “we have a system here that's really totally anglophone and how do we accommodate this person who wants to be heard in French?” They see language rights as forcing them to change their institutions, or to change the way the institutions function or the way they plan things.
There are other cases that brought forward the same problem. I don't know if you remember the case in northern Ontario on the funding for development of small industry. The government had established a very good plan and had consulted with people in the industry, but they had consulted with anglophones in the industry and had developed a plan that was accommodating those needs. When the francophones said that it didn't answer their needs and the government couldn't just translate into English what they had developed, it came before the court. The court decided that if the needs are distinct, you must have two kinds of consultations and develop a program that is not the same but has the same object.
That forces a government to change its administrative organization locally, I suppose, and this is what they find very difficult. Of course, in many, many cases, they just say that the community is so small that it's not really worthwhile. This is where we come in conflict all the time.
I think you're right. The government should itself have an implementation plan that is not based just on the actual right coming from the Constitution but I think on the planning of bilingualism in the service.