Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I am going to summarize a situation, but I am not asking you to comment since you have agreed to examine it. I just want to introduce it to explain how concerned I am about an issue that you and I have previously mentioned, Mr. Fraser.
In my riding, someone urgently needed a drug. He contacted the Department of Health, but none of the people he talked to were able to speak French during the three-week or four-week process. They justified the long delay in responding to my questions by the fact that they had to translate my emails. We were asking Health Canada for an emergency drug and I was constantly following up with the minister, but when I talked to her about it, this is what she said:
“Don't make that an issue.”
In terms of decentralizing the oversight of French-language services in departments and your study of those troubling cases, could you tell me how this study will be sure to accurately measure the impact of the decentralization? What do you plan to do to reassure us? You are saying that it is not necessarily a bad thing. I wish I could believe you but, for the moment, my experience on the ground as a member of Parliament is rather troubling.