Nakurmiik, Ms. Idlout. It's good that you are here today on this historic day.
Let me say first of all that under call to action 50 of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's calls to action, one of the things that I am charged with as Minister of Justice is to encourage the revitalization of indigenous legal systems, and there are many. There are hundreds of different kinds of legal systems, all of the Inuit, Métis and first nations legal systems, so there are a number of different projects that I am supporting to help revitalize those traditions. They are being led by indigenous leaders, elders, and I'm going to say “lawyers” in quotation marks, because they're indigenous experts in their own normative systems.
Those projects are being led, and I'm supportive of that. I think that in and of itself will help on the day-to-day revitalization of self-government and self-determination. It will also have an impact on the common law and the civil law and the structures that exist in the Canadian legal system. There will be a better appreciation simply because of that.
The question of bilingualism is an important one. To Canada it's very important, and it is important on the Supreme Court that we have bilingualism as a criterion. I think Justice O'Bonsawin has proven today, and there are others in the system I know of, that as an apex court, the top court in Canada, you have a whole career to prepare for it. Bilingualism as a criterion for that court I firmly believe shouldn't stand in the way of good indigenous and non-indigenous candidates.
Other courts don't require that each and every judge be bilingual. There are unilingual anglophones and francophones on various courts across Canada. It is an obligation for a whole court to be able to offer services in both French and English, but that will often mean sending a francophone judge to northern Ontario or an anglophone judge to a part of New Brunswick or Quebec, as the case may be. That requirement of institutional bilingualism isn't an impediment either, so—