We all acknowledge that the Official Languages Act needed more teeth. To achieve this, the federal government needs to acquire more official languages reflexes, while giving more power to the Commissioner of Official Languages.
By having a central agency within Treasury Board, the public service will be able to sharpen its official languages reflexes. The challenge right now is that departments operate in a vacuum. A great deal of work is done at the political level. I must contact my colleagues personally to follow up, whereas the reflexes would be simpler if they came directly from the public service. We want to create this central agency within the Treasury Board to maintain this approach and to ensure that it doesn't change from one government to the next.
In the past, under my predecessor Stéphane Dion, there was a central agency within the Privy Council. Unfortunately, when the Harper government was elected, it was eliminated. This undermined language protection in the federal public service.
If we incorporate our approach into the Official Languages Act, the approach will be much stronger. This will enable us to increase monitoring within the public service and thereby strengthen the Government of Canada's official languages reflexes.