Mr. Speaker, May is Speech and Hearing Awareness Month, and even through it is almost over, as is my habit, I want to draw members' attention to a very important cause: defending the rights of the deaf and hearing impaired, who represent more than 10% of the population.
There is much cause for celebration this year. First, on May 17, the CRTC finally handed down a decision requiring all English and French language broadcasters to caption all programs. I should also mention the success of the new CRIM software, which is a major advance in closed captioning. Starting in September 2007, CPAC will finally offer live captioning in French of question period. This is a wonderful innovation, because from now on, the broadcast will be in real time thanks to voice recognition.
I have championed this cause for a number of years, and today I am happy to celebrate these victories with the deaf and hearing impaired community. I will be closely monitoring the work of the round table to check the quality of the captioning.