It will be my pleasure to receive your letter and to reply to it.
We have brought in various measures, because we find it important that our minority official language communities have access to bilingual services. We feared that the low demographic weight of francophones in some regions of the country would hamper the provision of bilingual services, because of Official Languages Regulations provisions that required a certain percentage of francophones in minority situations in a given region, in order to offer services in French.
In order to avoid a possible lack of French services, we first of all imposed a moratorium, to make sure that in all of the federal offices outside Quebec that normally provide services in French, those services continue to be dispensed.
Afterwards, we amended the Official Languages Regulations to ensure that we increase our French-language service provision outside Quebec, since we knew that this was a big concern. That is what I announced last week, with the President of Treasury Board. From now on, a million Canadian men and women, especially outside of Quebec, will be receiving more services in French.