Thank you, Mr. Godin.
I won't be telling you anything new when I say that the purpose of the Official Languages Act is to have a certain transversality. This means that the act is applied horizontally, which involves all agencies and departments. The objectives will therefore differ from one agency or department to another, but there must be an obligation to establish those objectives and there must be effective consultation.
The regulations should set out what an effective consultation is so that we can then say that the consultation actually took place.
The Office of the Commissioner of Official Languages has set out very specific criteria for what constitutes effective consultation. The Fédération des communautés francophones et acadienne du Canada has also done so.
I won't repeat them here, but these are things we should see in the regulations to be able to say, following such consultation, that the agencies and departments have done their job. Objectives have to be measurable and we have to know where to get the evidence to measure how well they have been met.