Thank you, Mr. Chair. I didn't know you were strict about the five minutes, and I timed myself at seven minutes, so I'll cut out a few parts of my speech.

The Francophonie of Newfoundland and Labrador is a very small component, less than 5% of the province's total population, and that population is scattered across the province.

We are very far from having the demographic or political weight to impose our will on the provincial government and sometimes even to be recognized at all by our decision-makers. So, we have three ways to have our rights recognized.

The first is the demographic and economic argument that we put forward. We are a gateway for francophone immigrants, people who speak one of the most widely spoken languages in the world. We open international export markets. We also tell them that the the fact that we are francophones allows us to be more visible and influential within Confederation. For example, after 70 years in the Canadian family, the province finally has a judge on the Supreme Court of Canada who meets the requirement of being bilingual. So we are an asset to the province.

The second argument we can turn to is the Courts of Justice. Sometimes even the threat of litigation is enough to get things moving.

The third and final argument that we can tell you about is the federal government. This is the level of government that defends official bilingualism across the country. Although many essential services for the minority—such as education, health and early childhood—are mainly under provincial auspices, the federal government can encourage the provinces to better serve their linguistic minority with financial and other incentives.

And here we come to the Official Languages in Education Program, our beloved OLEP. First of all, I want to thank the federal government for initiating this program, not only for the development of the Francophonie in our province, but for its very survival.

However, not everything is perfect and I thank the Official Languages Committee for inviting me to discuss how we could improve this program. The major shortcoming of the OLEP in Newfoundland and Labrador is that the French-speaking community is in no way involved or even consulted in its development. Since the beginning of the Provincial Francophone School Board 28 years ago, not once has the province invited the board to participate in the negotiation or management of the three-year minority language education agreements that have been signed to date. I believe there have been seven of these to date.

To our knowledge, there has never been any consultation with the community to determine our needs. This goes squarely against the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and even the principle of “nothing about us without us”. The unfortunate reality is that people who are not an integral part of the French-speaking community identify what they interpret as the needs of the community and communicate them unilaterally to the federal government. This does not make sense, specially since clause 5.2 of the agreement requires that reports due to the federal government require the inclusion of a description of the consultations conducted with the main stakeholders for the development of the action plan and the consultation process that will be established for the implementation of the action plan. A provision of the Bilateral Agreement on Minority-Language Education thus provides that we be consulted.

However, the federal position seems to have been—and I believe it still is —that since education is a provincial prerogative, then the provinces should not be forced too much to follow the instructions of the agreement, except those related to funding. If the province does not consult its francophone community, well, too bad.

In 2017, we approached the federal government to insist that the province involve the minority community more fully in this process, without success. And so, the school board filed a lawsuit in Federal Court to force Canadian Heritage to fully apply clause 5.2 of the agreement. Seven years later, the case has not yet been heard. One of the reasons for this delay is that it is only recently that the community has come to understand in detail the workings of this agreement and the opportunities that we have missed over the years due to its lack of transparency.

As a result, we insisted on a meeting with the Minister of Education to develop a new protocol that would govern the negotiation and management of this agreement. We have just recently received the response that the province is ready to meet with us to discuss this issue.

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