Thank you, Mr. Chair.
The motion is as follows:
That, pursuant to Standing Order 108(3), and taking into account the Radio-Canada reports last Tuesday, which revealed new violations of the Official Languages Act within the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), the Committee hear from the RCMP Commissioner, Mike Duheme, no later than October 18 to discuss the RCMP’s plan to comply with the Official Languages Act and respect the French language.
As we know, Radio-Canada revealed that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police was hiring unilingual anglophones for bilingual positions. These employees do not speak a word of French and are not taking French courses, either. This is a flagrant violation of the Official Languages Act by the federal police. It is also far from the first time this has happened.
In 2016, the Commissioner of Official Languages announced that 16,000 positions required English compared to only 19 positions that required French. A little later, in 2019, the Commissioner of Official Languages announced that all of the 21,134 regular member positions of the RCMP were designated as “French non-essential”. In fact, some of those positions are bilingual, but no positions are designated as “French essential” anymore. The situation is really deteriorating.
Police training could previously be completed in either official language. Since 2019, it has been offered only in English or in bilingual format. As Stéphanie Chouinard said, any bilingual training puts francophones at a disadvantage.
The list of examples is long. For instance, access to information requests in French are processed less quickly than others. What's more, the Commissioner of Official Languages recently criticized the RCMP in Prince Edward Island because its warnings about dangerous weather were not translated into French until four hours later, jeopardizing people's safety.
I think it's very important that the committee hear from the RCMP commissioner.