Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Good afternoon. Thank you for your invitation. I am pleased and honoured to be here to talk about another topic of interest.
You should have received a document. It's a memorandum in English and in French. The first page outlines the four points that my colleague Mr. Roy and I will be presenting in the 10 minutes that we have. Toward the end, you will see an excerpt from a report by the Commissioner of Official Languages of Canada.
I will make two comments on the subject at hand, namely the full implementation of the Official Languages Act in the Canadian justice system.
The first comment is on the publication of judgments. That information is on page 2 of the document sent to you. The page numbers are in the top righthand corner.
First, the Official Languages Act requires that some, but not all, Federal Court judgments be in English and in French. This requirement depends on the importance of the judgment and the language chosen by the litigants. Section 20 is actually not well implemented. There is a problem with the translation of federal judgments, which is attributable first to a lack of funding in the federal legal system, and second to the ambiguity of section 20, specifically paragraph 20(1)(a). There is no consensus in the legal community or in the judiciary on the rationale for translating a decision. There are some quite surprising, tangible examples of that. I will be able to talk about it more when answering questions.
There is a second problem with the translation of judgments. A number of provinces provide no translation of the judgments rendered by their courts of appeal, superior courts, the Court of Queen's Bench or the Supreme Court, meaning the highest court. This measure would be very useful for promoting access to justice in French. In terms of part VII of the Official Languages Act, the funding could be increased so that the provincial courts of appeal and highest courts could translate more judgments.
Quebec had a program with $200,000 to translate some judgments into English. It is not too difficult to imagine how that could be reproduced elsewhere, in Ontario or Manitoba for instance. However, it no longer exists. Reinstating such a program would be a concrete and important measure to implement part VII of the Official Languages Act.
I will now turn to the second point, which is on page 5 of the document.
That's the role of the Commissioner of Official Languages of Canada. Initially, in the 1970s and 1980s, members of Parliament and senators talked about what is now the Official Languages Act. They wanted the Commissioner of Official Languages to play a more significant role before the courts. The Commissioner of Official Languages intervenes often, but he is seldom the main party leading the case.
Let's take a very concrete example. You surely travel more than I do. I go to Ottawa once a week. When I arrive at the airport in Ottawa, it is very difficult to be served in French at the security checkpoint. Half of the time, it's in English. I complain. Although Air Canada makes an effort, the service in French is not great, which may be a polite understatement.
Why should it be my job to complain every time to the Commissioner of Official Languages, to appear before the Federal Court and to initiate proceedings against Air Canada or the Canada Border Services Agency? Few do so. Those who do are basically the diehard guardians of French. Take Thibodeau v. Air Canada, for example. Mr. Thibodeau, who is a private citizen and a public servant living in Vanier, sued Air Canada. He won, then lost on appeal. He then took his case to the Supreme Court of Canada. The Commissioner of Official Languages intervened in the matter. The roles were reversed; it should be the other way around. When the problem is institutional, an institution with funds and a sizeable budget should lead the case. It's not an issue that an individual should have to resolve. That was your predecessors' intent, but it has not materialized.
The Official Languages Act should be amended to specify more explicitly, more clearly and more concretely when the Commissioner of Official Languages should appear before the courts, not only in the background as an intervener, but in the foreground, as a lead party. The details are in the document.
In closing, I would like to make two very short comments.
First, in terms of access to justice in French, it is especially important to know where the people who speak French are. There is also the issue of access to justice in English, but for the time being, I am most interested in francophones outside Quebec. To find out where the francophones are, we would need a better census. So there's a connection here with your other study. The fact that Statistics Canada does not allow people to give multiple answers to the mother tongue question affects much more than education; it also has an impact on access to justice.
As a final comment, I would like to point out that there are a number of issues with the Official Languages Act. Overall, it is a good piece of legislation, but it is old. It has not been amended for several decades and it is time to rethink it. Some of the issues we have raised today should be resolved not only through small amendments here and there, but an overhaul of the act in its entirety. There are issues everywhere—the census, services, part VII, access to justice in French—and they could be resolved if the act in its entirety were reviewed, rather than patched up with band-aids.
Thank you.