Thank you for your question, Mr. Choquette.
Evidence is crucial to making public policies that can serve the common good. Generally, in official languages, there is no analysis that could be referred to as language-based, downstream and not just upstream. When a disaster occurs, we often look into why it happened after the fact, when we could have prevented it.
In this case, I think that we are in a scenario that would have needed a linguistic lens, a lens of official languages, to ensure that this tool would not negatively affect the promotion of official languages, even if it is just used to write emails.
The federal government currently has what is referred to as “a filter” in place. After the Desrochers decision, the government established a filter to ensure that its programs—especially in terms of the vitality and development of official language minority communities—are not negatively affecting those minorities. That's called “a filter”.
Public servants have to put programs through that filter. I find that, in the federal public service, we don't just need a filter for all programs. We need a language-based analysis, similar to gender-based analysis. The idea is to ensure that the government's programs and policies are compatible and do not conflict with the promotion of official languages. This would have been useful for the entire federal public service, but it would have been essential to do that kind of work beforehand in this case. Official languages are too delicate of an issue to tinker around with.