I should point out that right from the very first couple of months, our office has always had legal counsel. This is not a new development. As I said, when I get a complaint I review it very carefully to see if there is a violation of the Official Languages Act or any other act. Let me make it clear that the fact that we are advertising for legal counsel contract does not mean that we are planning legal action against the government. It simply means that we are renewing legal counsel contract, which we have always had, for the third year because I need opinions on the act all the time.
As I said, I think there are a lot of departments that have been extremely cooperative. There are only some that are not really willing to accept some of the initiatives that we suggest. If I feel that the department is reluctant, or if they are not willing to try to implement suggestions that we make, or deal with problems that arise, and if the only person I can talk to is the deputy minister, that makes it really difficult for me to get everybody's side of the story and see if there is somebody who is not supportive or whatever, to try and find out who that person is or if they are working under a misunderstanding or whatever. In a couple of instances, the deputy minister has said to me, go ahead and talk to the people in my department about this particular issue. When they said that, we resolved it immediately and they said thank you.
I must say, if you look at the section on complaints and enquiries in chapter five you will see that we dealt with a lot of issues. Many of them were resolved. We do sit down and talk about things a lot and we do resolve a lot of things.
I think one of the things we need to do in our next report, as I mentioned, is to list all of the things we have accomplished and all of the things the GNWT has agreed, yes, this is a good idea, we'll implement it, because we have had those successes. But on some of the major issues that go on and on and on, those are the ones where I feel more frustration. I don't look at court action as a solution at all. I don't want it to come to that. I don't anticipate that it will ever have to, but it is one of the things that legal counsel has to be aware of if they are going to work for our office, that the possibility is there. Even for the federal languages commission, they've existed for 25 years, they've only been to court I believe six times or something, not very many times. It is only when an institution absolutely refuses after all sorts of negotiations and there are violations of the act, that they would ever go that route. We have been able, I think, just in the short time that we have had the office, to negotiate a number of settlements for complainants and issues that have to be resolved. So we do use that approach as much as possible, but there are still a lot of outstanding issues.