Let me identify one area where I think there is money being spent that is not achieving the objectives for which those funds were originally intended. That is the bilingualism bonus for public servants in bilingual positions. This was introduced 35 years ago, in the early 1970s, and at that point it was a fairly substantial amount of money, an $800 bonus to act as an incentive for public servants to get their language levels and move to bilingual positions. There is a general recognition and agreement with successive commissioners of official languages, who have said that this was not an effective way of encouraging the use of both languages and that it was discriminatory because it was not given to many bilingual public servants because they were not in jobs designated as bilingual positions.
There has been an implicit recognition that this is not an effective program because the bonus has not been increased since the early 1970s and $800 in 2012 is not an incentive the way it was in 1972 or 1974 when this was introduced. The program costs a total now of some $60 million. If that $60 million were redirected to language training or to various other programs, it would be a much more effective promotion of linguistic duality.