Official Languages committee  There are two ways to look at that. Contracting out means that those positions don't have to meet the language requirements. That work is done by a contractor who doesn't know both official languages, so we need to make sure that what the government says are its priorities are st

Official Languages committee  I'll answer the questions afterwards too.

Official Languages committee  If you don't have any qualified bilingual candidates, I think you should offer training to the ones you have, the ones who have competence. I'll turn to Michael Ferguson as a good example of somebody who was offered training, succeeded and now can work in both official languages.

Official Languages committee  That doesn't mean that we should forget about providing training. I think the government must provide training in the missing language. That way, the person can improve and can provide services in three languages, rather than just two.

Official Languages committee  We need to revise the bilingual bonus. In this assessment, we also need to ask whether the public servants in question are providing a service to the public. There are many public servants who are bilingual, but who occupy a unilingual position, not a bilingual one, and who there

Official Languages committee  I think it's fundamental to make sure there's inclusion in the federal public service. I'll go back to reconciliation. If you have members of a community who can speak the language, it goes a long way to say that we value and want to provide services in those languages. When s

Official Languages committee  I gave three recommendations. They're all critical, but, again, it's crucial that we have training programs that accommodate various learning styles, different schedules and equitable access. That shouldn't depend on whether my department has funds; it should depend on the priori

Official Languages committee  I'm going to answer in English just so it's clear. When we changed the Public Service Employment Act and we made language a requirement, we did ourselves a disservice, which means that we didn't allow people the opportunity to get the training they needed to become bilingual.

Official Languages committee  That's how it used to be. You used to be able to hire somebody in a bilingual non-imperative role, which meant that it would give them time, a year or two years, to obtain their language certification. With the change of the act and making it mandatory, you had to have the certif

Official Languages committee  Again, we're talking about the pitfalls of contracting out. We have less accountability and transparency. We have higher costs. When it comes to things like language training, we also don't have the matrices. It's about a check box or performance. I can give you a personal examp

Official Languages committee  Sometimes I feel like a broken record because policies don't mean that departments will comply. If there is no way for them to have mechanisms to ensure a department complies, the policy isn't worth what it's written on. They need to have centralized control. They need to have ma

Official Languages committee  Thank you.

Official Languages committee  In my opinion, if we're serious about official languages, we should centralize responsibility at Treasury Board. However, there is also a lack of resources. Budgets are insufficient. We can already see that departments have less money, and the first expenses they're going to cut

Official Languages committee  In my opinion, the situation isn't worse, but it hasn't improved either. We don't see things changing quickly. The act was intended to accelerate the achievement of objectives with regard to both official languages, but I don't see it working so far.

Official Languages committee  It's very clear that we have to go back to a centralized system to ensure the policy on language, as well as training, comes to fruition. We cannot have silos. We cannot have inequity happening among the departments—whether or not they have money to spend on training for certain