Mr. Speaker, the concept of a bilingual officers corps was adopted by the Armed Forces Council on June 28, 1988, to meet the needs of senior officials who had to be able to lead their subordinates in both official languages.
The "working language" remains the main pillar of the official languages program, set up to allow French speaking soldiers to work in French and English speaking soldiers to work in English.
Job and operational requirements of all units must be respected. There are three distinct types of units: the French language units, the English language units and the bilingual units.
A departmental committee studied the matter of language of work in 1992 and concluded that in the case of bilingual units, civilian and military personnel must be able to communicate with their subordinates in whichever official language those subordinates prefer.
The most recent report of the Commissioner of Official Languages acknowledges that progress has been made over the past year in the three pillars of the official languages program, even though according to Commissioner Goldbloom this progress has sometimes been slow, no doubt because of the complexity of the organization involved.