Initiative in Support of Access to Justice in Both Official Languages Evaluation

1. Introduction

This document is the report from the evaluation of the Initiative in Support of Access to Justice in Both Official Languages (the “Initiative”). The Department of Justice Canada (the “Department”) launched the Initiative in 2003, under the Action Plan for Official Languages, and broadened its scope in 2008 under of the Roadmap for Canada’s Linguistic Duality 2008-13: Acting for the Future (the “Roadmap”).

1.1. Evaluation Scope and Objectives

This evaluation covers all activities carried out to date as part of the Initiative’s five-year funding period, namely 2008 to present. Those activities involve both the language aspects of court proceedings and the processes for educating official language minority communities about their rights and obligations. The evaluation examines the Initiative’s relevance, effectiveness and efficiency.

The evaluation aims, among other things, to achieve a set of objectives involving the Department’s reporting process:

An evaluation framework, based on the one included in the 2008 RMAF, describes each issue that guided this evaluation. This evaluation framework is included in the annex of this report.

1.2. Structure of the Report

This document has six sections, including this introduction. Section 2 describes the Initiative, while section 3 describes the methodology used for the evaluation. Section 4 summarizes the evaluation findings, and section 5 presents the conclusions and lessons learned. Section 6 presents the recommendations and management response.