Once again, I wish to welcome all our witnesses. When I read your report, I was really pleased to see that you also focused on the successes. That interests me a great deal, because there is a saying in English and in French that says that success never comes before work, except in the dictionary.
We are continuing our work, and we hope to hear about many more successes. As you mentioned in your report, there have already been successes. I would like to remind you that our committee held a meeting this week. I want to come back to what Ms. Zarac said. Members of our committee are not necessarily always aware of what is happening in the field of official languages. I listened patiently while questions were put to our witness, the ombudsman. Certain questions on promotions within National Defence were repeated several times. Even our members did not know that on January 5, 2009, a general indicated in a letter that it was necessary to be bilingual in order to obtain a promotion. It was said that Mr. Toews was not very familiar with his department, but I would remind you that you do not always know everything either. On behalf of Mr. Toews, I wish to repeat that Part VIII refers to Parts IV, V and VI. It is not that Mr. Toews did not know that, it is that Part VIII does not exist without Parts IV, V and VI.
I would like to bet back to the success stories. I would like to quote a few words from your report: "[...] in the past year, Canadian Heritage has launched a number of initiatives to strengthen its interdepartmental coordination role for Part VII [...]"
We are aware that Canadian Heritage is now offering briefings to analysts from the Privy Council Office and the Treasury Board Secretariat in order to raise their awareness of the importance of Part VII in the way it should be taken into account during the examination of submissions and memoranda to cabinet.
Part VII is still mentioned, because there have been successes. Mr. Toews is aware of these successes, which have affected his department. That is how Part VII affects his department.
Canadian Heritage is currently putting the final touches on a tool for Part VII in order to help departments preparing memoranda to cabinet so that they can include a good analysis of the possible repercussions of their policy and program proposals on official language minority communities and on linguistic duality. These are examples of successes within Canadian Heritage, and there are others.
There is one thing I would like to know. If you were the Minister of Canadian Heritage and Official Languages, what would you do differently?