Mr. Bastarache, thank you very much for being here with us today.
I have a clear recollection of your presence at the committee when we studied the amendment that would have required that Supreme Court Justices be bilingual in order to ensure access to justice in both official languages. I am pleased that you reminded our committee about the importance of amending the Official Languages Act to ensure that all justices of the Supreme Court will be bilingual, and that everyone will have access to justice.
According to your presentation, there are three ways of approaching changes to the law. First of all, we may consider the courts. I'll get back to that later. We may also take into account the public's expectations. This involves, among other things, section 20 of the charter, which deals with services to the public. Finally, we can evaluate the quality of the act's implementation, of course.
We talked a little about the Commissioner of Official Languages. He is our watchdog for linguistic duality, or at least that is what we hope.
Recently, in British Columbia, the federal court handed down a decision about much bandied-about part VII of the Official Languages Act, which is about the engagement of the federal level, but is not accompanied by any regulations. According to that decision, part VII does not mean much, because there is no clear definition of what a positive measure looks like. In other words, if the measures don't hinder anything, there is no problem. There is no real engagement on the part of the government.