What a nice birthday present! Thank you very much.
Earlier my colleague talked about figures for New Brunswick and other provinces. Personally, I have the figures concerning the city of Toronto. According to the 2006 statistics, 229,280 persons there are bilingual. In greater Toronto, the number is 418,505. I will never believe you can't recruit bilingual people in that community. That's just Toronto. That doesn't include New Brunswick, Manitoba, Quebec... It's almost incredible that Air Canada doesn't offer—I said this earlier, but I'm repeating it—bilingual services today, in 2009, at airport facilities.
I'm going to tell you a little horror story that I experienced on an Air Canada flight. A unilingual French woman seated next to me needed an extension for her seat belt. She spoke to the flight attendant, who didn't speak French and who simply told her: “I don't speak French.” To help her, since the plane was taking off, and since I'm bilingual and felt this was an emergency, I spoke to the flight attendant and asked him for an extension. I won't tell you the nasty comments I heard coming out of his mouth.
Since the woman didn't understand, he probably felt free to say: what a fat woman, it's incredible, or something like that. It wasn't really gratifying. The woman was panicking because she must have thought the plane was taking off and she wasn't belted in yet.
These kinds of things shouldn't happen. It's happened to me once, but it was extremely unpleasant. The woman asked me what the attendant had just said, and I didn't repeat it to her. It wasn't worth the trouble because I would have stressed her for no reason. It was also a long trip; we were going to Vancouver.
Earlier I talked to you about safety. This is part of safety. If a flight attendant isn't even able to understand that a person needs an extension for her seat belt—and this happens regularly, if not often—that's serious. It's unacceptable.
You say it, but you don't even have any figures to give us today. You're telling us that there were 86 admissible complaints. I'm convinced, madam, that there are 10 times more, even 100 times more. However, people don't necessarily know where they can complain to. I know that, at my office, we receive complaints of this kind because people think they'll go see their member. You'll have to make an effort on this matter and present us with some real figures because we don't have any, any figures, on bilingualism.
By how much has bilingualism increased or decreased among your employees? We have absolutely nothing here that tells us exactly where you stand. And you're asking the government to help you! And yet we have no information, no indication, no figures. You'll have to do your homework in certain areas.