Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Ladies and gentlemen members of the committee, thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak to you.

This committee has heard many statistics concerning the disparity in funding among post-secondary institutions in Canada, as well as between French-language and English-language institutions.

I would rather like to focus on the reasons why the federal government must support French-language communities outside Quebec more directly and rethink the way funding is allocated to communities. Answering that question actually helps better understand the challenges related to this matter.

For over 50 years, I have been advocating for the promotion and defence of French language and culture, both locally and internationally. I have done that as a member of Parliament for Queen's Park over four terms. I have also done it as president of the Assemblée de la francophonie de l'Ontario, as a community development officer, and so on.

As a fourth generation Franco-Ontarian, I think I am in a position to properly evaluate the past, current and future situations of French outside Quebec.

For more than 262 years, Canada's francophones have been aspiring to true equality between this country's two official language groups. However, that true equality has been slow to materialize. A person does not need to hold a doctorate degree in this field to understand the reality of our experience. All they need to do is avoid watered down history texts published over the years, texts that have been approved by governments, even the church, and which have been redacted. Those texts have hovered over our reality, which has not always been rosy. I would even talk about institutional and individual francophobia. In those texts, authors carefully avoided describing real obstacles we must constantly face—that reality and that francophobia—generation after generation.

Provinces have even adopted laws and regulations to ban the teaching of French. For example, we, Franco-Ontarians, have for decades been subjected to the Government of Ontario's infamous Regulation 17.

The symbol that unites us, as francophones, is the fleur de lys. However, if we were to let certain members of the majority adopt a symbol more representative of the way they see our quest for equality, I am sure they would choose a bar code, like the ones on products. We are being perceived as an unjustifiable cost, a frivolous expense and a waste of public funds. That is what I have often heard.

At a time when we absolutely deplore the horrible racism that has been and is still being directed at first nations, Blacks, Asians, Muslims and so many others, it should also be understood and accepted that Canadian francophones also deserve a slogan like “French Lives Also Matter”.

You have witnessed the way the Government of Ontario stopped supporting the creation of the Université de l'Ontario français and the way it has abolished the position of independent French-language services commissioner. You have seen how Laurentian University, although bilingual, has cut French programs in an unfair and shameful manner; how Campus Saint-Jean, in Edmonton, is on the brink; and how an advisory committee, in Newfoundland and Labrador, even proposed abolishing francophone and anglophone school boards.

Provincial governments still refuse to understand, accept and implement their role, their duties and their commitment toward their own French-language communities. That is why the federal government, in its mission to achieve substantive linguistic equality in the country, must get involved and ensure that francophone communities can fully benefit from French-language programs at the post-secondary level.

The Official Languages Act must better reflect the real needs of our French-language communities. Since we still don't have full linguistic equality, asymmetric amendments to the act must be a possibility, if necessary, to comply with our distinct and urgent needs, as we are still catching up.

Thank you for your attention.

Transcript

Discussions (0)