I think there are two or three important points to consider.
In 2018, it will be 30 years since the Official Languages Act was reviewed or amended in any significant way. In 2019, it will have been in effect for 50 years; it has been in effect since 1969. It may thus be time, for my successor and the government, to review the act, given that in 1969, the Internet had not even been thought of. All data was recorded on paper. Even when I was appointed, Facebook and Twitter had just been invented. They were not tools the government used to function and communicate. In 2017, we will not only be celebrating the 150th anniversary of Confederation, but also that of bijuralism in our country. There will be a conference, in March I believe, which we are jointly organizing with the Canadian Bar Association, and which will mark the introduction of our two legal systems in Canada, the civil law and common law.
And then there are all the impacts of the technological era to consider; there is no set time frame for that turning point. There is no point at which we will be able to say it is over, that the change has been made and that we are now living in a new era. Things evolve month to month. Even when I was a journalist—I changed professions 10 years ago—I noticed that every time a commission of inquiry on telecommunications was held by the government, the changes that were suggested became obsolete before the recommendations were even drafted or published.
I see that the technological changes are happening so quickly that we cannot even imagine a day when we will have arrived at some digital Eden, nor believe that that day will ever come. We are living in a time of constant change. We have to ask ourselves how that change can be used to foster official language minority communities in Canada, rather than diminishing or marginalizing them.