Yes. The Official Languages Act uses it. We really drew inspiration from that act, especially the part on the appointment of judges to federal courts. Paragraph 16(1)(c) says to ensure that, “if both English and French are the languages chosen by the parties for proceedings conducted before it in any particular case, every judge or other officer who hears those proceedings is able to understand both languages without the assistance of an interpreter”. Our wording is based on that. We thought that, if this works for our federal courts and for the bilingualism requirement for our judges and since the criterion is very similar, it could apply to my bill.
On March 26th, 2013. See this statement in context.