A Look Back at the Last Few Months, Part 4: Conference of Lawyers Without Borders Canada, the AGM of Canadian Parents for French, an Entité 4 Meeting, the Forum de lutte à l’itinérance 2013 and Franconnexion

2013.12.17 - Billet Retour sur les derniers mois, quatrième partie FR

Commissioner François Boileau with the President of CPF, Ms. Lisa Marie Perkins, in Victoria.

Following my first, second and third blog posts on various important events that I attended in 2013, I will begin today’s post with a review of the annual conference of Lawyers Without Borders Canada (LWBC), “Changing society through the law”, which was held in Québec on October 5. I had the opportunity to take part in the conference’s second panel discussion, on strategic litigation in Canada, a way of bringing down the barriers to the full realization of human rights. My presentation was on collective language rights litigation in Canada and its impact on Francophone minorities.

Two weeks later, on October 18, I was in Victoria, British Columbia, to attend the national Annual General Meeting of Canadian Parents for French (CPF). Once more I extend my thanks to the entire CPF team for their warm welcome, and for again having given relations with Ontario’s Francophones prominent billing in the coordination of this event. Fittingly, the title of my presentation was “Rapprochement between Francophiles and Francophones: An evolving dialogue”.

On October 21, 2013, I gave a presentation at a meeting of the board of directors of Entité 4 in Toronto to provide its members with a description of the new approach being taken by the Commissioner’s Office and to engage in a constructive dialogue on their work and progress.

Two days later, on October 23, I was in Ottawa to attend the Forum de lutte à l’itinérance 2013 of the Coalition pour prévenir l’itinérance chez les francophones d’Ottawa (CPIFO), an event that dovetails perfectly with one of the current priorities of the Commissioner’s Office, which is to pay special attention to the needs of disadvantaged groups in the area of access to high-quality French-language services.

I took advantage of this visit to Ottawa to meet with the Centre multiservices francophone de l’Ouest d’Ottawa (CMFO) and to “kill two birds with one stone”, so to speak, by attending the great debate “La jeunesse francophone en plein envol” [Francophone youth in the ascendant], held as part of the Symposium on Ontario’s Official Languages, “Franconnexion, a wonderful (and highly successful, I might add) event organized by the Assemblée de la francophonie de l’Ontario (AFO).

I will return soon with a fifth blog post in this review of various significant events that I attended in 2013.

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