Let us start with the advantages. Administrative penalties are quick, easy, automatic, and set out in an act, a regulation or an order. There can be criteria in the act that would allow the commissioner to set the process in motion after he has written a certain number of reports on Air Canada's shortcomings in complying with the act.
The other solutions require people to go to court.
One of the disadvantages mentioned by the commissioners, but not by me, is that if a commissioner investigates Air Canada—or any other institution, if we extend the system to other federal institutions—he could be frowned upon. Air Canada could say that it is well aware that, if it does not do what is required, there will be an automatic penalty. That would change the commissioner's role into the language police, and the commissioner would not want that.
I say that there is a way of structuring the system in order to create a kind of partition between the commissioner's function to investigate and recommend, and the function involving administrative penalties. In the structure of the Office of the Commissioner of Official Languages, there would be a division dealing solely with administrative penalties. The commissioner could decide that enough was enough, and could send a report to his administrative division, which would set the process in motion.