Thank you, Mr. Chair, vice-chairs and honourable members, for the invitation.
It is a privilege for me to share the podium with the representatives of the French for the Future group, Ms. Kolodziej and Ms. Leurent.
We are here to discuss Bill C‑13. I hasten to point out at the outset that I think this is a very good bill that proposes important, indeed necessary, reforms to modernize the Official Languages Act.
I commend the leadership of the two successive ministers of Official Languages, ministers Joly and Petitpas‑Taylor, who have been able to steer the file of this modernization with aplomb and who have been able to propose serious and ambitious bills based on a premise that we can no longer afford to ignore: French is in decline everywhere in the country, even in Quebec.
It is therefore incumbent upon the federal government to take note of this and to take major steps to turn the tide and achieve the real equality of French and English, as mandated by the Constitution of Canada.
It is in this spirit that I invite the committee to consider some amendments to Bill C‑13. These are amendments that I believe could further strengthen the bill and better equip the Canadian francophonie for the future. I have grouped my suggestions into four categories.
I also hasten to point out that I am endorsing here the representations of the Fédération des communautés francophones et acadienne du Canada, or FCFA, regarding the six amendments that should be made to Bill C‑13 to strengthen and finalize the act. I will not repeat them all here, except the one about the implementation of the act. That is, in fact, my first suggestion.
It must be recognized that the implementation of the Official Languages Act has remained its Achilles' heel for the past 50 years. Like the FCFA, I believe that Canadian Heritage can continue to play a role in the strategic development of official languages, as it has built up useful institutional expertise in this regard. However, I believe that the coordination of the implementation of the Official Languages Act should be entrusted to the Treasury Board for the entire act, not just parts IV, V, VI and the proposed new subsection 41(5). The power of the Treasury Board to subdelegate its obligations to another federal institution should also be removed in order to properly centralize and standardize the implementation of the Official Languages Act.
My second suggestion relates to the bilingual nature of the Constitution. Canada is an officially bilingual country, but most of the constitutional texts have force of law only in English. This is inconsistent and untenable. Section 55 of the Constitution Act, 1982, requires the adoption “as soon as possible” of the French version of the Constitution of Canada, which has still not been done. I therefore adopt the proposals of Senators Dalphond and Carignan to add a provision to Bill C‑13 that would require the Minister of Justice or another responsible minister, such as the Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs, to make best efforts to enter into discussions with the provinces and territories with a view to validating the French version of the constitutional texts, and to report periodically to Parliament until this is done. The work of patriation will not be completed as long as the Constitution remains primarily in English.
My third suggestion concerns the application of the Official Languages Act in times of crisis. My colleague Professor Cardinal and I have studied this issue in detail. I had the opportunity to speak with the office of the former minister of Official Languages to emphasize the importance of respecting official languages at all times, and especially in times of national emergency such as the COVID‑19 pandemic. The fact that Bill C‑13 contains a sentence in its preamble that recognizes this principle is fantastic. However, I also believe that a section should be added to the body of the bill to clarify the application of the act in Canada's emergency plans—a responsibility of the Minister of Public Safety—and to prohibit the suspension of bilingualism rules for signage, labelling, or communications in times of crisis, as the Minister of Health did at the beginning of the pandemic and as Conservative Health Critic Michael Barrett has recently proposed. This is regrettable. We must not allow this kind of slippage.
My fourth and final suggestion concerns access to justice in French. Bill C‑13 removes the exemption for the Supreme Court of Canada in section 16 of the Official Languages Act. This is an excellent start and I say bravo! However, I adopt the proposal of the Fédération des associations des juristes d'expression française de common law that the Official Languages Act must also require the Minister of Justice to take into account the language skills of federally appointed judges to ensure a proper distribution of bilingual judges across Canada.