Commissioner, I encourage you to have a look at what transpired in the House yesterday evening on CPAC. I asked Minister Raitt questions about VIA Rail. I had to repeat my first question three times because she couldn't understand the translation. So I said “welcome to the Supreme Court of Canada”. I urge every Canadian to have a look at that. It gives you an idea of what the French-speaking community has to put up with.
We are talking about the highest court in the land, and yet our Prime Minister refuses to appoint judges who are bilingual. There's all this talk about language equality, but exactly where does that equality stop? The Official Languages Act has been around for 45 years. Those appearing before the Federal Court or the Federal Court of Appeal can be heard and understood in their first language, but not those going before the Supreme Court.
I am disappointed, and the tremendous value I place on both of our official languages is probably why I get so upset. Anglophones would never be in this boat, in other words, they would never have to appear before a Supreme Court judge who didn't understand them. But francophones do.
My next question is an important one. It concerns something that really bothered me at the time and still does, even though I will try not to let my emotions get the better of me.
You mentioned your office move, Mr. Fraser. You now share office space with those who work for the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner and the people at Elections Canada, among others. That leads me to wonder about partisanship. I'm not sure whether I'm explaining myself clearly, but I wonder whether there's a risk to agents of Parliament sharing office space. I imagine you would say no, since you agreed to the move. Nevertheless, the fact that all of you are working together does worry me somewhat, in that you might have to investigate the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner one day, or vice versa.
Sharing office space may very well save you $800,000, but does it not jeopardize the non-partisanship of agents of Parliament?