Chairman Chong, Vice-Chairs Bélanger and Godin, ladies and gentlemen, good morning.
Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Josée Forest-Niesing, and I am president of the Fédération des associations de juristes d'expression française de common law inc., the FAJEF. Today I'm here with Rénald Rémillard, executive director of FAJEF. I want to thank you for your invitation, and for allowing us to speak to you briefly about the FAJEF and the progress that has been made as a result of the Roadmap for Canada's Linguistic Duality.
The FAJEF represents seven associations of francophone lawyers and its mission is to promote access to justice for francophone minorities. Consisting largely of professionals, the FAJEF has a community mandate and works closely with its network and with numerous citizens' groups. For your information, there are associations of francophone lawyers in the four western provinces, Ontario, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. The seven associations of francophone jurists represent approximately 1,400 lawyers, and the number is increasing every year.
This presentation will focus on some of the effects of the Roadmap for Canada's Linguistic Duality and, more generally, on the recent projects in the area of access to justice in French outside Quebec. As you probably know, Justice Canada provides financial support under its Initiative in Support of Access to Justice in Both Official Languages. In practical terms, this support fund enables various stakeholders, including associations of francophone lawyers, to carry out projects, among other things, to promote careers in justice, provide legal training in French to numerous stakeholders in the justice sector—among others, to Crown counsel, clerks, defence lawyers, judges and others—and also to increase awareness among the general public and, more particularly, seniors, youth and francophone newcomers, in numerous legal topics and concerns, including the criminal field, which concern them directly as citizens.
For example, the website of the AJEFS, the Association des juristes d'expression française de la Saskatchewan, currently has more than 229 documents providing legal information for the public. Here are a few brief examples of justice projects for seniors, youth and francophone newcomers. For lack of time, we won't be talking about families.
With regard to seniors, a few days ago, the Association des juristes d'expression française de l'Alberta, gave information sessions on the prevention of senior abuse to 85 participants in Calgary and Edmonton. Twenty-five similar information sessions will be offered in New Brunswick very soon. Similar projects are also under way elsewhere.
The FAJEF has provided training sessions to approximately 200 lawyers to date, in Ontario, Manitoba, British Columbia, Alberta, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, to enable them to better advise their senior clients who are dealing with abuse or fraud.
The Association des juristes d'expression française de la Nouvelle-Écosse has prepared and distributed excellent legal information sheets of interest to Nova Scotia seniors. Those sheets concern subjects such as wills, power of attorney, medical directives and so on.
We believe that this project should be exported elsewhere and that the needs of this clientele will continue to grow, particularly with the aging of the population.
As for youth, we must mention the numerous activities and successes of the AJEFO, the Association des juristes d'expression française de l'Ontario, in promoting careers in justice, careers as police officers, probation officers, lawyers and social workers, not only to young francophones in Ontario, but also elsewhere in Canada, with the aid of other provincial AJEFs.
In New Brunswick, the AJEFNB has organized a summer law camp every year for the past few years to stimulate young people's interest in this field. In addition to promoting careers in justice to students at French and immersion schools, a number of AJEFs are helping to organize school debates and information sessions on crime prevention, the youth criminal justice system, criminal law and so on.
As for awareness and integration of francophone newcomers to Canadian society, the AJEFs and the FAJEF are already working with various local, provincial and national immigrant groups to promote careers in justice to newcomers as police officers, clerks, probation officers and Correctional Service officers and to better inform the members of those communities of their rights and obligations in Canada. For example, every month, with the help of the AJEFM, Accueil francophone du Manitoba offers information sessions in Winnipeg on topics related to family law, criminal law, wills, employment standards, rental issues and so on. The level of interest in and need for these information sessions is obvious from the fact that more 20 persons regularly attend them, even though they are offered on Friday evenings.
As you know, the Roadmap focused to a great extent on training to increase and promote better access to justice in French. We feel some recent progress in this area is worthy of note. For example, the Centre canadien de français juridique, which was established by the FAJEF in 2010, has offered remedial training in legal French to more than 100 provincial and territorial stakeholders, clerks, probation officers, Crown counsel and legal aid lawyers operating in the provincial and territorial systems and the administration of justice outside Quebec and Ontario.
Face-to-face training sessions, which are receiving excellent evaluations, will very soon be combined with aspects of distance training. Lastly, the centre is also providing significant support, through its expertise, for the development of a national training program for provincially appointed judges. That program will include a major evaluation component and a competency grid.
In Ontario, a family mediation training project is currently underway to enable francophone couples and families to receive more of these services in French. In British Columbia, the AJEF is helping to develop lawyers' legal French by organizing mock trials in which the community and youth take part, which provides them with an opportunity to learn more about the Canadian legal system.
As you can see from these few examples of projects, recent investments in the justice sector are having an impact and direct and real effects for citizens as well as on the capacity of the legal system and the administration of justice to provide better access to that system in French. Of course, access to justice in French is not easy or perfect, but we nevertheless believe the Roadmap is producing positive results, and in a number of cases even very positive results. We believe we should continue building on that progress.
Those are our preliminary comments. Mr. Rémillard and I will be pleased to answer your questions.
Thank you for your attention.