Thank you for your question.
It's an important question. When I said we had to give the act "some teeth", I was thinking of one of your former colleagues, someone I very much liked, Senator Jean-Robert Gauthier. That's what he always said. In 2005, when he introduced his reform to encourage the government to take positive measures to foster the development and vitality of the official language minority communities, he said that the Official Languages Act had to be "given some teeth". I always think of Mr. Gauthier when I say that.
Minister Joly has conducted very important consultations of Canadians. Many recommendations have been made precisely to give the act teeth. The FCFA introduced quite a comprehensive bill that would provide for administration of the Official Languages Act to be handed over to a central agency. It would also require Supreme Court justices to be bilingual and reinforce the right of government employees to work in the official language of their choice.
I think what you need to do is take everything that was said during those consultations and review all the proposals that were made. There's an enormous amount of material that could be used to bolster the Official Languages Act. You could also consider all the recommendations that all the commissioners of official languages have made since that position was introduced and determine which ones were implemented. You would see that not that many have been implemented. With all that, you'd already have what you need to strengthen the Official Languages Act.
A lot of proposals are circulating. They all have to be evaluated, of course, but there are some very good proposals that would help strengthen the act. My colleague Martin Normand and I published a paper as part of the University of Ottawa's IMPACT initiative in which we detailed a set of factors to which I refer you. These factors are designed to ensure that the Official Languages Act is reinforced.
If there is one thing I would focus on, it's the lens. All government operations should be viewed through an official languages lens, a francophone lens, to ensure the Canadian government's policies are consistent with its legal and constitutional official languages framework.