Good morning, Mr. Commissioner.
I would also like to welcome the team from the Office of the Commissioner of Official Languages.
I agree with Mr. Bélanger and the Fédération des communautés francophones et acadienne du Canada. You are not the one who is responsible for this. All you did was write a report. In fact, I would like to thank you for the quality of this report. I wish to emphasize this. You tell it like it is.
You said a little earlier that this was a slow process. However, as far as I can tell, it is more like a slow death. This might come sooner than expected. For Canada as a whole, especially for the anglophone majority, official languages is a pain in the neck. Proof of this lies in the fact that there is no leadership on the issue. The dream of official bilingualism, which many people who identified themselves as French-Canadians, such as Pierre Elliott Trudeau, shared, is but a dream. It is not reality. Here is more evidence of that.
This makes me the best ever advocate for independence, despite the fact that I am a Franco-Ontarian and that I worked to get French schools in Saskatchewan. There is no respect for the French fact. It eventually led me to conceive of a project. I told myself that one day there would be a French-speaking country in North America, that we would be a good neighbour to Canada, but that at least the French culture and language would be respected. I felt that this country should be located where there was a critical mass of francophones, namely in Quebec. That's where I stand today. If you come up with a better idea, please tell me. What I see before me supports the things I just said.
It was in 2009, when the ruling in the DesRochers case was handed down, that we began to emphasize everything the Official Languages Act should be. Institutions have to make sure that they can communicate with all Canadian citizens in the language of their choice. English and French also have to be of the same quality. This was in 2009, but the act was adopted in 1969. Has it taken us 40 years to understand this principle?
The DesRochers case is before the Supreme Court, is it not?