Ireland is the only country to administer legislation that corresponds almost exactly to our Official Languages Act. Their law is modelled on ours to a certain extent. They have an Official Languages Commissioner who plays the same role—in other words, receive complaints, carry out investigations and, in this case, encourage the use of the Irish language. In contrast, Switzerland and Belgium take a much more territorial approach than we do. It's coercive, in a way. If you move from one side of the street to the other and, in so doing, you cross a language barrier, you no longer have language rights and your children are not allowed to attend a minority school, for example.
The approach reflected in our Act is based somewhat what has been done in Finland. That country has unilingual and bilingual regions, and a central government whose obligation is to provide two language communities with services in both languages. On the other hand, there is no commissioner per se who reports to Parliament; there is an official within the Department of Justice whose job, to a certain extent, involves receiving complaints and comments.
With respect to your question about approaches based on incentives as opposed to coercion, I believe a mix of the two is appropriate. First of all, the Act is clear enough when it comes to laying out the obligations of institutions, but in order to be truly successful, linguistic duality must be seen as something to be valued, and not just as a series of obligations that can be perceived as a burden.
To respond to that perception, we assessed our own ombudsman role with a view to implementing a facilitated resolution process. In any case, all of this requires a full range of tools. I noted that the best way to apply the new facilitated resolution approach was to clearly convey the message that if the Act was not complied with, more serious steps could be taken. In those cases, we initiate legal proceedings against certain institutions; but when institutions show good will and the desire to improve, we are prepared to cooperate with them. The Act provides me with a range of tools and I try to make use of all of them.