I'll start with the first part about the planning tools and the consultations with respect to building economic development plans for official language minority communities.
At Industry Canada, our role is foundational with respect to some of the research that is done for supporting a better understanding of what the conditions are for official language minority communities, how various tools are effective in building economic development plans, and best practices with respect to what communities, businesses, or individuals could be doing to support official language minority community economic development.
Over the five years of the “Roadmap”, there were a considerable number of studies done. All of the studies that have been finalized to date have been made public; I think there are a couple that are still being finalized. We have used this work to both inform and work with the regional development agencies to ensure that they have the information, suggestions, and ideas before them in terms of their own planning for their specific programs and services, as well as using these research projects as tools with the communities that we consult with regularly.
We have two regular consultation mechanisms. One is the biennial—every other year—consultations with the official language minority communities, both the anglophone communities and the francophone communities. These are valuable opportunities for bringing groups together. Our regional offices and regional development agencies participate, sharing information.
The communities had noted that meeting every other year does not provide necessarily enough of a continuity of dialogue, so we've also implemented follow-up committees that meet on an ad hoc basis more regularly throughout the year, potentially a couple of times. We try to use conference calls and technology to be efficient in terms of bringing communities together at different points so that there's a more regular dialogue that goes on with the communities to share information.
With respect to services in both official languages, Industry Canada has been, as many departments have been, the subject of audits. We have had a number of recommendations made with respect to what we, as a department, could be doing to ensure that we provide services in both official languages.
We have done regular reviews of our own work as a result of an audit that was focused mostly on Part VII, official language minority communities and economic vitality, but we went a bit broader and looked at official languages throughout the department.
We implemented both an action plan and a policy statement on official languages, so these have been very foundational with respect to ensuring that we have good tools to go out to our employees to explain to them things like linguistic duality positive measures and what your obligations are.
I'll leave it at that at this point.