Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Good afternoon, Mr. Boivin. Welcome.
I am a proud graduate of the faculty of law at the Université de Moncton, and I have always been a member of New Brunswick's Association des juristes d'expression française. I was on its board of directors for ages. During my student years, I worked at the Centre international de la common law en français, which you surely know. So I'm familiar with the issues.
I'm from northern New Brunswick. Everything I'm hearing are things I haven't experienced. As a lawyer, 95% of my 23 years of practice was exclusively in French. Our judges, prosecutors and police officers are bilingual. The prisons are bilingual, too. However, once we leave northern New Brunswick, which is sort of Canada's testing ground, it looks like the rest of the country.
There are other players in the legal world that we don't think about. Who comes to mind in particular are francophone women accused of a crime who had to serve two or three months in prison. There is no prison for francophone women. The situation is the same everywhere. There are even francophone young men who go to prison and don't have a prison for them. So it's a problem.
I have a thousand questions. I don't want to get carried away. I'm quite familiar with the matter. I want to go back a little to the end of what my colleague Mr. Choquette was talking about. Francophone cases are as interesting as anglophone cases. There is another negative effect of having one bilingual judge. Not only is he compelled to do only this and expects nothing else, but it is our experience in New Brunswick that bilingual judges are in too much demand, much more than their unilingual anglophone colleagues. They work much more because they need to be everywhere and need to travel a lot. They aren't often home, and that causes conflicts in the agendas.
On the topic of agenda conflicts, some cases are delayed because there is no bilingual judge nationally. What is your reaction to that? How can we solve this problem?