Mr. Chairman, as the ombudsman for the Canadian Forces, part of my work is to make periodic visits to armed forces bases and wings across the country, as well as in Afghanistan, which I had the pleasure of visiting about a year ago.
During my visits, I tried to meet with forces members of all ranks and all backgrounds. When I spoke in that context to a group of French-speaking recruits at Borden, some of them told me that they were having problems. I met with three groups of between 12 and 15 people, for a total of about 40 people, and I asked them to explain what their daily life was like at Borden.
I was very struck by the comments made by a man, who was about 34 years old, originally from Chicoutimi, in the Saguenay—Lac-St-Jean region, where I come from. He told me that he was stationed at Borden and that he did not understand a word of English. When he was on the parade ground or in his company and people spoke to him for 25 or 30 minutes in English, it was as if he was hearing Chinese, since he did not understand anything. He told me that he tried to make them understand that he was having problems, and that he would like to be spoken to in a language that he understood, but they looked at him as if it was up to him to adapt. People even told him to learn English and to come back and see them later.
That is how I first learned about the problem at Borden. Then in June, we took a much more systematic and in-depth approach. We sent two investigators who met with 185 recruits.