Official Languages committee  We made the decision not to ask for additional funding in this budgetary cycle. However, for the next cycle, we are preparing a request for Treasury Board for additional funding, for specific purposes. We are also preparing a long-term financial strategy to assess our needs.

Official Languages committee  Yes.

Official Languages committee  That is correct. We do not have a choice, and in the beginning of the year we forecast general funding for the two main branches, the Compliance Assurance Branch and the Policy and Communications Branch. If there are changes along the way, we reallocate the budget to cover the ad

Official Languages committee  Yes.

Official Languages committee  I will give you a preliminary overview, and then I will ask the others to add more details. For the Atlantic region, we have an office in Moncton. We also have offices in Montreal and Toronto. We have a satellite office in Sudbury, that is to say a person who does liaison. We ha

Official Languages committee  I did not prepare a statement to initiate this part of the discussion. I would simply like to point out that Ms. Lagacé, our director of Finance and Procurement, agreed to interrupt her sick leave in order to be here to reply to all of the difficult questions. I want to thank he

Official Languages committee  I will begin with your second question. No, the office of the Commissioner of Official Languages did not work on that tool. We answered that like other sectors of the public service, we would be willing to use that tool when it was implemented. It is true that we were asked to a

Official Languages committee  No, that would be with your permission.

Official Languages committee  What impresses me the most about that bill is the idea of putting an end to using statistics to determine if a region will continue to obtain federal services in both official languages. I have always thought that using percentages of the population to determine services and the

Official Languages committee  I will start with the second question. The federal government has often offered technological tools to the public. I am thinking for instance of Termium, a sort of dictionary which was developed by the federal government. For a long time, its access was limited to federal govern

Official Languages committee  I think there are two or three important points to consider. In 2018, it will be 30 years since the Official Languages Act was reviewed or amended in any significant way. In 2019, it will have been in effect for 50 years; it has been in effect since 1969. It may thus be time, fo

Official Languages committee  One of the challenges I encountered in minority communities was visibility. I discovered that the francophone majority in Quebec did not understand or recognize clearly that there are one million francophones throughout the country who have schools, universities, radio and televi

Official Languages committee  Precisely. In my annual report I include a letter to my successor. I make a distinction between the linguistic spaces where the minority language can be seen, heard, and spoken, for instance community spaces like schools and other public places, and linguistic networks that allow

Official Languages committee  I already spoke about the lawsuit we brought about this. We have been having discussions to try to agree on a memorandum of understanding allowing us to investigate complaints. I have always said that I was not interested in intervening in matters of programming pure and simple.

Official Languages committee  That was speculation on my part. When people ask me questions about translation tools, I always reply that someone absolutely has to revise the final product. I often give the following example: when the tractor was invented, the farmer couldn't just sit on his veranda and look