I can read French quite well, Mr. Chairman, but I'm not a lawyer or a legal drafts person. I've looked through these documents here and have tried to figure out the problems Members have. I think you can boil it down to this, whenever you have some ideas and you want to put them down in a language, then the language you choose is going to be the best way in which to represent those ideas you have. Even when you put it down in your language, how close you get to those ideas depends on how good you are with that language. The legal profession has spent many hundreds of years getting as precise as you can a definition of the thoughts that you want to put into legal language.
Sometimes Members are worried because we have tremendous experience with language in the Northwest Territories and people wonder, if you have an idea that you put into one language and the thoughts from your background in that language, whether you can have a perfect match then if you move from one language to another. We know, from our own experience, that it is difficult to get translation precise. It seems to me what we have here is always open to question because whenever you put complex ideas into a language, you always have to worry about the problems and degrees of precision.
The answer I would have expected from the Minister is that we have legal people here who recognize that the original thoughts were put into English and now we have to take those same thoughts and put those into French. And that we have communicated across the country with people in the same business as us, using the same body of ideas, and we have now come up with the best effort possible to ensure that those ideas are now well-expressed in both languages. I'm satisfied, even though I'm not a lawyer, that what we have here is probably the best effort you can have to get this piece of legislation well-expressed in the two languages.
I think if we are going to get into an argument about languages and linguistics and so on, we are going away from what the intent of this bill is. It is to make sure that the best effort is being made to ensure that the bill is well-expressed in these two languages. I'm quite satisfied with what has been done here. Maybe to help Members, though, I wonder if we can get just one translation back into English. What is exactly meant by "bien la societe?" What does that mean in English?