EditorThis is a near-verbatim transcript of an in-person interview I did with Michel Gauthier in Ottawa on June 8, 2017, as part of my project to compile an oral history of the plain language movement in Canada between 1980 and 1995. Although the transcript reflects his views at the time, those views might have evolved since the interview took place.
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IC: So thank you, Michel, for coming to meet with me and speaking about your experiences with the clear communication and the plain language movement. And so the first question I have for you is, when did you become involved with the movement, and what inspired you to join?
MG: Well, I started to work for the federal government—actually for Revenue Canada—back in 1974, and in 1980, I moved to Ottawa, because I had a promotion, and I became a manager. And my first managerial position in Ottawa, I was the manager of client services, and I was responsible for all telephone inquiries. I was responsible for ministerial correspondence, and I had about 130 people working for me during the peak period. So I had a direct contact with Canadians, and I noticed that a lot of Canadians had difficulty interacting with us. You know, searching for information. Even asking the right question to be able to prepare an income tax return. And… and then in the ’80s, there was this first report about literacy—Broken Words—I think that was published by Southam Press in Toronto. And I think that Peter Calamai was… was behind all of this—the journalist. So I started to read that in the ’80s, and then after reading the report, it kind of raised some flags for me. And I knew immediately within myself that I had to do something about it. So I had to acquire more knowledge and… and so forth. But I was also learning my new job and everything, and one of the first things that I saw is—for example, in the ministerial correspondence activity, out of the 130, 135 employees that I had, I identified about four or five that were capable of writing.
IC: Wow.
MG: Couldn’t find anybody else. And it made me realize that, well, we have to do something about internal communication as well. And it made me realize that we have to start first by improving our internal communication—that would lead to better external communication. If the people inside the department can’t write or have difficulty in writing, how can we simplify our material for the external clients? You know, it’s almost an impossible task.
Then there was this training division in Revenue Canada, and they did a thorough study of the quality of our correspondence across Canada in district offices, also in processing centres, and so forth. In summary, the result of their evaluation was that a large proportion of our employees were unable to write properly. So it kind of confirmed what I saw offhand with my own staff. So it’s like a big puzzle, you know? So you take one piece and another piece, and you put all that together, and sure enough, I kind of grew with it.
I went… On my own training, I met Mark Vale in Toronto, and Mark Vale was hired by Revenue Canada to train employees that were involved in publication. So our own staff in Revenue Canada, in the publication department—they were being trained in plain language in the late ’80s, I would say. Then Statistics Canada came out with their first literacy study. At that time, they only had four levels—level one, two, three, four—about literacy skills of our own population. That was in 1988. And it kind of reinforced again the value of doing something much bigger and much more extensive in terms of simplifying our communication with clients.
Then I went to management audit, and then after my mandate in management audit, I was assigned the task to look at all of our correspondence across Canada in 52 sites for 53 programs, and I was mandated to develop… Because back then, believe it or not, we were still writing with clients by hand—like, a Notice of Reassessment was done by hand. And so my mandate was to develop a new… a more modern and electronic correspondence system, OK? And that project took seven years to implement, and we’ve created about 15,000 letters and paragraphs in both official languages, and the first bunch of letters—and I will always remember—the first bunch of letters, we involved the communication branch. We brought in a team of experts, and we started to apply the… back then was the plain language concepts, OK? So the first 350 letters in both languages, we started to work on that. And that’s how I raised my awareness, and we kind of—very slowly, you know—grew with that.
After that, I got more training and I did more reading about literacy concepts, and in 1994, Statistics Canada published another report—The IALS report—the International Adult Literacy Survey. Now, more countries participated in that survey, and the beauty of that report was that they really explained very well the process of reading and processing information. And that’s how I got involved.
Then the Minister of Statistics Canada sent a letter to all departments, so all ministers received a letter about the IALS report, so… And I was still working on those letters—and my project was called the ELCS project, the Electronic Letter Correspondence System—and one day, in the circulation file, there was this memo about the IALS study, and I said to myself, “Well, here is the opportunity for me to become a champion of plain language and also raise awareness about literacy.” But I waited three months. The memo circulated in the whole department, and there was zero reaction. And at that time I was working in the Client Service Directorate, and I was kind of linked to the Publication Directorate as well. And there was zero reaction to all this. So I went to see my director, and I would say in a span of about 10, 12 minutes, what I did is, I did a parallel. I said, “How would you feel if you were the CEO of a big car company, and I would come up to you and I would have a legitimate study that the clients who are using our cars don’t understand anything, don’t know how to use it? How would you react? Because you have a potential… the potential of going bankrupt here, you know, if you can’t sell your product and people don’t understand your product.” And she said, “Well, I would be flabbergasted,” you know. I said, “Well, that’s exactly the issue here. Here we are, Revenue Canada, and we are communicating with all Canadians, all corporations. We have one of the most complex process and documentation that will ever exist. It’s complex. And I said there’s a large proportion of Canadians that just can’t use it. That don’t understand it. That can’t find it.
I was aware of prior studies that Revenue Canada had done, and I have the data with me, and I said, “We receive about 23, 24 million telephone calls a year, and out of those phone calls, 17% are repeated calls.” And I used to be the manager of telephone inquiries, and a lot of my staff were saying that Canadians just don’t understand. We have difficulty explaining them how to prepare an income tax return. And even my own staff had difficulty in using certain forms, like RRSP. If you over-contribute in your RRSP, there’s monthly penalties, and the form itself, there’s over 112 tasks on that form, because you have to calculate monthly. Anyway, it’s a complex form.
So my director said, “Wow.” She said, “Michel, prepare a project plan.” So we called it the Literacy Project and what I did—I did a situation analysis of Revenue Canada. I took all the pieces of information that I could find across the board within Revenue Canada, and I prepared a situation report. I linked the internal issues to the literacy issues. I kind of blended that together. I partnered with Statistics Canada, and I had Statistics Canada assess the complexity of our income tax returns, and the one that comes to mind is the senior return—for seniors—and what happened is there was a total disconnect between the literacy proficiency that was required to process those returns and the document itself. It was too complex.
So the project… I received funding, we created a team, then my thinking was, “I won’t be able to move forward unless I have complete support of senior management, including the Minister of Revenue Canada.” So I decided to have a global strategy to raise awareness of our 45,000 employees. And I started at the top, and I went across the country with all the data, and it was an overwhelming success. And I had the buy-in of, first, all of senior management, and we started to do concrete things to simplify our products. But it’s a huge task, because back then we had about 800 forms and about 1200 information leaflet, pamphlet guides, and so forth. So it’s a monumental task. So instead of seeing it as a huge pie that, you know, that we can’t eat all at once, we started to identify key products that were highly… there was a high usage, OK, and started to simplify one product at a time.
And that’s where I started to move away from the expression “plain,” OK? And I kind of drafted a loose summary of my 20 years’ experience in doing plain language, and I’ll share with you where I am today or around 2009, when I retired. Then I realized that we have to move away, because it’s reading to do.
Clients… No one is reading government documents just for the pleasure. And for me, there was three different types of reading. There’s reading, leisure reading, OK, just for fun when you read a novel or so forth. Then there’s reading to learn, and then there’s reading to do. And most information in the government, whether it’s municipal, provincial, or federal, it’s reading to do. You know, they’re asking you to apply, they’re asking you to comply, they’re asking you information to update their file, and so forth.
And insurance companies are no different, OK? So it’s not just the government. It’s all across the board. So for me, I wanted to find a way of applying the reading to do theory and concepts.
And then I looked at the literacy definition, and when you look at the literacy definition, there’s four words that come to mind: people have to find information, and if they have to find information, the information has to be accessible, OK? Then they have to be able to read it. That’s my second word. The third word, they have to be able to understand it. And my last word is using it. They have to be able to use it.
So I kind of came up with a different concept of what plain language was all about. I moved… at one point, I was using—and I highly recommended the Translation Bureau of not using “plain language” but to use “clear and effective communication. At first, we were using “clear and simple communication,” but “simple” was too close to “plain.” So we came up with “clear and effective communication.” Now, the word “effective” is very important here, because “effective” means results. It means that your document is doing a good job, and it’s doing so much a good job that the client who is using it is doing the task that you’re expecting them to do.
And then I kind of moved away again from that second expression, and today I would use, you know, “accessible, usable, and effective information,” OK? And then I would say… I would say to people, “Well, actually you want to create useful information.”
Because what I’m finding is that people, they write because they want to say things. Well it’s not because you want to say things that they are useful, you know? So it’s got to be useful. It’s got to be effective information, and this allows people to create useful content based on what a user needs to do. OK? And that is very important.
But that was not enough, because—I have a good example here. And this is this week, OK? I saw a news on Radio Canada, and it’s about the people that were flooded in Ontario, OK? Now in Ontario, 500 houses were flooded. And as of today, they only received seven requests. So the government was concerned.
So the journalist was interviewing people who were affected by those floods, and they were saying that it’s very complicated. You know, the forms, and so forth. But these people are totally exhausted. They have to go to work. They have to keep track of all their documents. They have to strip the basement and sometimes strip the first floor. And then out of the three persons that the journalist was interviewing, there’s one of them—I know that person. And she sells houses in our region. She’s a real estate agent. And she’s, you know, she’s got good literacy skills, I suppose, and she said, “I just couldn’t find the button to download the form.”
So what I did is I went on the website myself, by curiosity, and the process is complicated. And then when I tried to download the form, it wouldn’t download, because I had a message saying that my Adobe Reader was not up-to-date. And you know what? I have the most up-to-date Adobe Reader, because I’m paying monthly to get all those updates done automatically on my computer. So I had the 2017 Adobe Reader software. So what was wrong with their website?
So this is a good example that in the whole process of doing clear and effective communication, you need to add the human touch. OK? You need a lot of empathy in the process. You have… there is a literacy organization in Montreal, they partnered with a hospital, and they were saying, well, plain language is not enough. What do we do to reach hard-to-reach patients? And it’s not because you put something in plain language—if you may allow me to use that expression, because all those documents refer to plain language. I would be able to write something in plain words that you may not be able to do the task. That is the issue here. It’s not just about words. It’s not just about syllables. It’s not just about short sentences. It’s about the task. What are you asking the person to do?
Also what I realized and why I moved away from it is that I understood that it was an interdisciplinary concept. So you had to put a lot of pieces together—like, when do you use visual information as opposed to linear text? When do you use a form? Should the form be on the website? All those questions matter, you know? And so I learned Information Mapping. That’s what I did. And organizations have big challenges in implementing those concepts of plain language, effective communication, and so forth, because a lot of time they send the writers to the plain language courses. And I remember back in 2003, 2004 I went across Canada—actually, I did every province, and we had conferences, and about 1,200 people participated. And later these people who were surveyed, because I was kind of the spokesperson of a national literacy organization—I was doing this as a volunteer on my own personal time—and the result of that survey, after those conferences: Most people agreed it was very, very difficult to implement what they had learned. OK? So that… I can conclude by this that you absolutely need the support of senior management. Otherwise, you won’t be able to implement what you’ve learned.
There’s another myth that I would like to dispel. Managers think that because they’re sending one employee on plain language, either a half-a-day workshop or a full-day workshop, they think that that employee will be able to simplify complex documents. And it’s not the case. I’ll give you an example. In Australia, it takes three to five years to become a good form designer. When you work in publishing, you know, it takes years of experience before you can apply everything that you have learned. OK? So that’s something that I would like to dispel.
You also need a comprehensive measurement system to measure the result. Because it’s not because you’ve simplified something that it will work with the clients. In Revenue Canada, that’s exactly what we’ve done. We kept… I hired a company to, first of all, look at how people with lower literacy skills interact with Revenue Canada. And that was called the COGEM Report, and I can make that available to you. And that was really, really an eye-opener—on how people with low literacy skills interact with [Revenue] Canada. Luckily for Revenue Canada, we already had a volunteer program. OK? So people would help people who were unable to prepare tax returns. So we beefed it up, and we raised awareness about it.
There was another issue that surfaced during my evolution, and it’s the fact that the roles between the writer, the expert, the editors, and then the decision maker is completely out of whack. They don’t understand their role. So you’re gonna have the writer that’s going to come up with a document, the editor is going to do their work, and then it goes up the chain of command, and they all tinker with the document based on preferences and so forth. And so I created a document to help people understand that each step of working on a document, you have your own responsibilities, and don’t try to fix something unless you have the knowledge, OK? So don’t try to rewrite what an editor and a plain language expert was trying to do. And otherwise, the document goes up and down, up and down, up and down, and you never see the end of it.
And the problem gets even worse when you have both languages. Can you imagine? And very often, documents are written in English first, and the French document is written in crisis at the end. In Revenue Canada, in the publication division, we were not doing it that way. Both documents were written at the same time. So we had a French writer, an English writer. And the two of them were partnering with the communication branch, and they had plain language agents in the branch, and both documents were kind of developed not separate but in parallel, and you avoid the risk of making mistakes in the interpretation of the law, the regulations, and so forth, because when you think about it, all documents in government come from a law, a regulation, a rule of some sort, a policy. So those who write these documents use complex words. Lawyers, accountants… And another reason why I moved away from the word “plain” is because it has the perception from these people that we’re dumbing down—it’s a dumbing-down exercise. So it’s hard to market something when people perceive it as a dumbing-down process. So that is another reason why I kind of moved away from that.
There is a quote—actually, there’s three quotes that I really like from Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin. And she was saying “Access to justice in Canada remains a serious problem that imperils the public’s confidence in the justice system.” That’s the first quote. The second quote is, “There is no justice without access to justice.” And that’s why the word “access” is so important. And the last one, and the most important one, “We cannot understand our rights… If we cannot understand our rights, we have no rights.” So for me, that was very important—to add the words “access,” “understanding,” “usability.” [Michel gave me a printout of the publication Literacy and Access to Administrative Justice in Canada: A Guide for the Promotion of Plain Language when he spoke to this point.]
So all of my thinking in moving away from “plain language” is all based on facts and the evolution of literacy, additional ways—different ways—of evaluating documents based on the task.
The UK is actually doing that. They moved away… I don’t know if you are aware of the work of Sarah Richards—actually I was on the phone yesterday with Dominique Joseph, and she’s more aware of these things because I retired in 2009, so I kind of moved away from that, but I still have an interest today, and Dominique had a lot of knowledge about what the UK did, and that’s exactly what they did. And I quote, on their website, you know, “Government has the tendency to publish content that is more focused on what it wants to say than what the user needs to know.” And there’s another line here—“A user need is something that a user will need to do.” Applying, complying, and so forth. So the UK, for me, is a good example of an organization that has evolved.
And I’m not saying that the plain language movement did not do some great things. It triggered a lot of interest across Canada, across the world—you know, the Europeans, the Australians, the UK, the Americans. So we could see a lot of good things, and I’m, you know… I’ve been always a great supporter of that movement, and I have met some wonderful people who have… it was their life mission, you know? I participated in the PLAIN Conference. I also delivered a workshop to show the literacy complexity assessment guide and tools in Toronto a few years ago, and everybody kind of welcomed that approach that was different.
You know, some people have some kind of an emotional attachment to the expression “plain,” and they still use tools that are not necessarily the best tool to assess the complexity—like, you know, reading formulas have limited use, limited value, and I also moved away from using those tools.
Iva, I just want to share here a copy of a private bill that was presented in 1999 in our Parliament, and it was called “An Act to Promote the Use of Plain Language in Federal Statutes and Regulations.” In short, the act would be called Plain Language Act. There was three of them that were presented, to my knowledge, and they all failed. There was no appetite for it, probably a lot of objection to it. And I have debated this question with a lot of my friends who were knowledgeable about plain language, and I am not sure that we need a plain language act. Maybe it would serve a purpose, but I’m not sure that we would make big improvements. There’s a lot of emotional terms to legal words, so it’s not easy to have lawyers change their writing habits.
Some are willing to change. As an example, I pulled out, a couple of days ago, out of a magazine that I receive—l’Actualité, which is a French magazine—and judges are being trained every year to improve their writing, and they’ve been doing this for over 30 years. So there is a willingness in the legal environment to simplify things, but it’s not that evident.
In my mind what we would get more benefit—instead of a plain language act—we would get more benefit if we would have a centre of expertise—an official one—where we would have certified professionals. And my thinking is to have something similar to what they have at the Laval University, but even more extensive, where they would be able to assess the complexity of documents in terms of levels or in terms of the concept of “reading to do” and everything that I’ve shared with you this morning.
And it would be a great advantage if they were to develop uniform standards. We lack uniformity in terms of plain language. All the writers have their own perception of what plain language should be. And they have their own interpretation, so there’s no uniformity across the board, between French and English, so it’s a problem on both sides. So to me, we need an organization that would be an umbrella organization. That was one of my goals. If we go back to the beginning of the interview and I said to you I had a great interest about plain language and I personally made it a mission for me to raise awareness across Canada. And if I were the Bill Gates of clear and effective communication, I would invest a lot of money in a centre of expertise, and I would make this known across the world, because being Bill Gates, money would be no object. And then I would hire the right people with the right mindset, OK? People that are willing to evolve, with new technologies, new ways of assessing documents—in the same way that the UK did it. The UK is limited to the web, OK, so the UK is a good example, but we need to broaden this to other documents as well. So that is what I wanted to share with you about the plain language act. So I don’t know if you have other questions.
IC: Oh, yeah.
MG: You do?
IC: When you were trying to implement all of these changes, did you encounter resistance?
MG: A lot of resistance, and I’ll give you an example. When I left Revenue Canada in 1999, I went to work for the Canada Pension Plan and Income Security Program. And the reason I was invited there, they had heard of all the work that we had done in Revenue Canada. Because I didn’t do this alone. I had lots of enthusiastic partners in Revenue Canada, so I don’t want to take credit for this. It was a question of a team effort. And they had heard about our work, and so they called me and said, “Michel, can you come and make a presentation about plain language?” And that was in 19… end of 1998, beginning of 1999, and I said, “Of course.”
So I went there, I made a presentation, everybody was gung-ho, they wanted to do it, and there was a lot of enthusiasm over the concept. And then I, all of a sudden, six, seven months later, I get another call to go back. I said, “What’s going on?” “Well, we don’t know how to do it. There is some… Some people want to do it, and there’s resistance.”
And I said, “OK.” So I went back, and I made another presentation. I had a large audience of managers and specialists, and I waited a couple of weeks and then called back, and I said, “So, you know, it’s almost been a year now. I’ve done two presentations,” and they said, “Well, we don’t know how to do it.” And I said, “Well, what about me going there and help you implement?” And I was ready to move. I was, you know, I was ready to… I had been working in Revenue Canada for 26 years, and I said, “Well, I will do it for you. I’ll go.” And I was offered a job—a 12-month assignment—and then I was offered a permanent job. And I stayed there.
Now, to come back to your question if I had a lot of resistance—well, in the first few weeks or the first month that I was there, I was told bluntly by one of the project leaders, “You come to our meeting, but we’re not going to make too many changes. So you’re welcome to participate, but we’re not going to make too many changes.” OK?
IC: That’s sounds discouraging.
MG: Yeah, so I said to myself, “Wow!” I said, “That’s challenging.” I said, “You have no clue to who you’re speaking to,” because that just triggered a greater motivation to get it done. And we did it. And that person was excluded from the process. There are ways of dealing with those resistant people.
But… and I’ve had numerous times where I had resistance. So you have to step back and try to see what angle is better to convince them. And I was very successful in many… not with all participants or all people that I had to deal with, but I would say in many cases, I managed to convince them, you know, to influence them in changing their mindset. So you just have to step back and you have to hit them where it hurts the most. That’s where you have to hit them. And when you start talking about the effect it has on the budget, on the cost of miscommunication. And I did a lot of research about that, and miscommunication can cost any organization, private or public, up to 35% of their operational costs. It all depends on how bad the communication is. And I called this “the black hole.”
And actually, there’s a book about that. And I’ll give you a very good example about the black hole. I was working at Public Works, because the Translation Bureau was part of Public Works. And one day I received a phone call from an employee who was responsible for an activity in Public Works to process certain types of forms related to the insurance. And that particular form was being used all across the government. Because when you’re hired as an employee, you have to fill up a form to determine what kind of coverage you want, OK? It’s a two-page form—not a long form—but it’s a two-page form.
So I meet with the gentleman, and so I asked him. I said, “OK, what’s the issue with the form—you know, what kind of problem do you have with it?” And my first question was, “What’s your error rate with the form?” and he said, “I don’t know.” Oh, OK. Well I think that’s something important that you need to know. So I said, “Before we do anything, you’re going to go back to your office, you’re going to sample a hundred forms, and you’re going to list the types of errors with the form, why the forms are not being filled properly, and so forth.” And I said, “By the way, there’s a paragraph at the end of the form—I don’t understand it.” And I remember filling that form, and I remember reading that paragraph, and I just couldn’t understand it. So I said, “You being the expert, you’re responsible for the form.” He said, “Yeah.” So I said, “Explain to me what that paragraph means.” And believe it or not, he had to read the paragraph three or four times, and he could not explain to me what the paragraph meant. And that paragraph had been on that form for years! And I said, “Well, there would be an added value if you would figure out what are you trying to say here. So go back to the office, gather the information, and then we’ll talk again.” So a couple of weeks later, he comes back to my office and he says, “You know what?” He says, “We have an error rate of about 80%.”
IC: Wow.
MG: Eighty per cent of the forms are being returned to the human resources section of each department. I said, “You’ve got to be kidding me.” I said, “You have any idea how much this costs?” He said, “Yeah, lots of money!” So luckily for me, my wife worked—or used to work—in the Human Resources Department in pay and benefits, and she was an expert in that field. So I called my wife, and she said, “Oh, that damn form.” And I said, “Why are you saying this?” “Well,” she said, “The staff fill the form; they send it to PWGSC, and the form comes back.” And she said, “I don’t understand the form.” Oh! That’s interesting! So I kind of shared that with the gentleman. Guess what? We were almost ready to start, and the supervisor decided not to do anything.
IC: Oh.
MG: So that’s the kind of resistance that you’re gonna get. But in other cases when you hit the sponsor or the person that would like to do it but is not completely convinced, you have to find the angle and prove to them—as Dominique Joseph… I’ll quote Dominique Joseph here—“You have to make them fall in love with the problem.” And they fall in love with the problem when you hit them in the wallet. So you hit them on the cost, and then you show them the benefit of it.
And normally that approach will work a high percentage of time. Especially at the higher level of management. And all the documents that I’m leaving with you here today? You’re going to see a lot of that in my documents in convincing senior management. And I’ll just share with you one moment that I experienced when I was trying to convince senior management in Revenue Canada. I remember sending the document to my assistant deputy minister, because he was the first one that I was trying to influence, and I sent to him the situation report about the literacy challenge that we had in Revenue Canada, and I’ve explained, literally, you know, some of the costs and the challenges that we had. And when I came back, he had convened all his directors and director generals, and he said in front of them, he said, “I invite you to read this report, and I invite you to act on it, and to work with Michel.” And he said, “Michel, I read the report; I fell off my chair. I read it a second time, and I fell off my chair the second time.” To me, I knew I had succeeded, because the attention of an assistant deputy minister is very short. Usually, you’ve got 10, 12 minutes with them. In this particular case, I knew I had his full attention. And he realized that this was very costly for Revenue Canada.
The other big challenge that people have or will have in the future to implement clear and effective communication is the fact that key players in each organization change. OK? So when I left Revenue Canada in 1999, that movement within Revenue Canada fell flat. And in 2010, 2011, they almost had to restart from scratch, because all the players had changed. The government had changed, and they were cutting the budgets. Because the first thing that goes when the government cuts resources, it’s training and communication and human resources. Unfortunately, that’s the reality within these organizations.
IC: Sorry—I’m just checking the time. Um, we’ve got about 10, 15 minutes, but I’d love to hear more about English versus French and what differences you’ve perceived, what different challenges there were, and how you made those two pieces fit together.
MG: That’s a very good point. Because when you… Especially in the federal government. And also provincial governments. Not all of them, because the need for both languages is different in each province. When you look at it from a federal perspective, obviously, both languages are important. We live in a country where we have French and English as official languages. The big challenge is that most documents are written in English first and then they’re translated. And sometimes you read the French document, and the French document is always done at the end of the project. And the timeline is very short, and so sometimes the quality may be deficient, so that is a major issue.
So for me, the best approach would be to write those documents—in an ideal world—would be to have both documents written in parallel format like we did in Revenue Canada. But I understand that this is wishful thinking in some cases. Not everyone has resources to do that. In terms of the difference between the French and English, well, there’s a lot of people that think that the French is much longer—more words, we have articles which we don’t have in English, and some English words are easier to use because, you know, they will grasp a concept. In French, the perception is that sometimes it’s more precise, so, you know, it would be hard for me in 10 minutes to explain all the intricacies of each language. But the challenges are pretty much the same in both languages. There was a very, very powerful movement in Quebec, and I remember because I was invited to make presentations in Quebec organizations at Laval University. They had a very good program there. If you want to have insight on the French, I would suggest that you call Isabelle Clerc at Laval University, and she will give you a lot of good insights and information, because they did a lot of useful projects there with a lot of departments in simplifying their information. So that’s, you know, in the time that we have left, that’s about what I want to say. I hope that this was useful to you.
IC: Yes, this was fascinating.
MG: And if you have any other questions or if you need documents or whatever on everything that we’ve discussed this morning, I would be delighted to share them with you.
IC: Well, thank you.
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Michel also shared printouts of some documents that I scanned because I can no longer find them online: