In fact, we started doing standardization in the 1980s under the aegis of what was called POLAJ, an initiative of the Department of Justice. Since then, we have done standardization in several areas of the law: the law of evidence, contract and security law, the law of trusts, family law, property law, and estates law. For the last three years, we have been working on alternate dispute resolution.
The problem is that our funding is granted on an annual basis, which means that it is not predictable. We never know how much we are going to receive. We need expert jurilinguists to do this kind of work. When we run out of funds, as happened this year, we have to stop the work completely. We are not able to complete the work. We constantly find ourselves playing catch-up. In fact, there are hundreds of years of common law we have to catch up with, and that is not possible with this kind of ad hoc approach. We know for only a year at a time how much we are going to receive and how many people we can have working on these initiatives. When will we get to the point where the common law in French can be expressed in the same way as the common law in English? We are constantly playing catch-up.
We are in the process of designing a new approach. At this point, we are doing standardization in entire fields of law, because that approach has an advantage. When we standardize in a field, there are a lot of related terms. We therefore do a lot of work at the same time. However, we would also like to be able to respond to ad hoc needs that arise. It must be noted that the common law is evolving at lightning speed in a number of other fields, such as medical assistance in dying, terrorism, and immigration. We have not even begun that yet.
We need to adopt a truly systematic approach. Instead of looking at a single area of the law, it would be better to address all these needs at the same time.