Thank you, Mr. Arseneault.
Let me just point out that I am not a constitutional expert. I work with a lot of them, but, as a lawyer, I handle litigation. Nevertheless, I have had the opportunity to argue some major constitutional cases.
I would like to say a few words about the Université de Moncton. Yesterday, I was talking to Rodrigue Landry. In the early 1960s, when the Université de Moncton was just being set up, an important decision had to be made. The premier at the time wanted the university to be bilingual. Other community leaders wanted it to be French. At the time, making the university bilingual wouldn't have been a problem because the francophone community wasn't as vulnerable as it is today. Laurentian University in Sudbury and the University of Ottawa were set up as francophone universities initially but became bilingual institutions later on. When they became bilingual, that was fine because francophones weren't vulnerable. The church was strong and played an important role, and families were strong too. Francophones had the support of a social system that enabled them to maintain their language and culture, but that is no longer the case.
There are several constitutional arguments, but the main one is the gift we received from the Supreme Court of Canada in the Quebec secession reference. According to the rules set out in that decision, if a province decides to separate from the country or wants to do so, we have to look at the contract. If a party wants to end the contract, the terms of that contract have to be clear. We looked at the Constitution. The Supreme Court said that some elements are not written into the contract, but are part of it anyway. These are the responsibilities governments took on when they signed the Constitution in 1867. One of the implicit clauses was the obligation to preserve and promote linguistic minorities. That implicit constitutional obligation is part of the Constitution.
The Supreme Court went further still, saying that linguistic minorities in every province need institutions to survive. That is part of the Supreme Court of Canada's decision. If we consider the decisions that have been made, amendments to laws, and everything a particular government is doing, we can tell that government that a contract binds it to those obligations, that everything it does has to respect that, that it's in the Constitution, that one of those obligations is to respect and promote the linguistic minority, and that failing to respect that obligation in a given undertaking is a violation of the contract that was signed when this country was formed. That clause is essential.