Senator Dagenais: Government leader, you talked about the Governor General’s impressive effort in delivering the Speech from the Throne. Wouldn’t you agree that the amount of time the Governor General spent speaking French during the speech would have been more appropriate for one of this country’s dialects than for a constitutionally recognized official language?

Hon. Jean-Guy Dagenais: My question is for the Leader of the Government in the Senate. I must begin by telling you how impressed I was by the letter the Minister of Finance, Ms. Freeland, sent to the CEO of Air Canada, Michael Rousseau, to denounce his attitude toward bilingualism and his affront to all francophones in the country, which your Prime Minister described as a gaffe. I hope that Ms. Freeland will undertake a rigorous follow-up of the commitments she received from the Air Canada board of directors. In fact, I wonder why it was not the Prime Minister himself who signed that letter on behalf of Canadians and francophones, a group to which I belong. I could also ask you whether the Prime Minister was uncomfortable with requiring the CEO of a private company to be bilingual when he himself did not observe that rule in appointing the Governor General of Canada.