Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for his compliments. I am happy to talk about my love of the language and even about other very well-known Montreal poets, if he likes, since we are speaking of flagships and golden ships.
All this to say that I understand that we need to take action. Our government has recognized the importance of taking action. We have done so for the past five years, by bringing out a historic plan for official languages, saving CBC/Radio-Canada, doubling the budget of the Canada Council for the Arts, and providing funding for the French-language military college in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, which had stopped granting university degrees and educating our soldiers in French. We also restored French-language services and were able to reinstate the court challenges program.
We did so much that, while we were doing all that work, we said that we absolutely had to go back to the beginning, to the legacy of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, who introduced new official languages legislation in 1969, after the Laurendeau-Dunton commission.
Today, society has changed and reform is necessary. That is why we are moving ahead with this reform.