There is something I do not understand, Madam Minister. Last Tuesday, officials from the Department of Justice came to testify before the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights. One of them was Michel Francoeur. He talked about sections 530 and 531 of the Criminal Code, which clearly describe the right to be tried before a judge in the official language of one's choice.
I asked the witnesses if there were enough judges to guarantee that right. I gathered from remarks by Mr. Doyle, another of the witnesses, that there were a lot of bilingual judges in Canada. I asked him to confirm that for me and he replied that it was true, that there are enough.
There is some contradiction, you might say, between the comments of certain federal officials and those of the Commissioner of Official Languages. The former say that there is a sufficient number of bilingual judges, the latter says there is not. I find it difficult to understand. I will be honest with you, I purposely made him repeat his answer three times, because I had such a hard time with it.