Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I want to thank the witnesses for appearing in front of us today--Minister, Madam LaRocque, and Monsieur Lussier.
It's interesting that we're having this meeting right now, and you've made reference to this in your report, that we are increasingly living in a diverse country. The 2006 census highlights the increasing diversity of this country, a country that is one of the fastest growing in the world and one where one in five Canadians now is foreign-born, a number that is only going to increase in future years.
I commend you and your department for starting to tackle the challenge of diversity while, at the same time, trying to preserve our institutions and some of the values on which our nation has been founded, values like official bilingualism and linguistic duality. So I commend you in that work and I strongly encourage the department to continue tackling that challenge, because I think it will be one of the biggest challenges we face in the coming decades--how to accommodate that diversity while preserving some of these cherished institutions and cherished values on which our nation has been founded.
In that context, a very important part of maintaining some of these values, like bilingualism, has been the action plan for official languages, which we all know is expiring in March of next year. My questions for the minister and the deputy minister are these. Maybe you can describe to this committee what steps will be taken between now and April 1 of next year to renew the action plan for official languages. And when might we hear about the successor to the action plan for official languages?