Thank you very much, Mr. Chair, ladies and gentlemen, members of the committee.
I would like to begin by thanking you for inviting FCFA du Canada to appear today, on behalf of Canada's francophone and Acadian communities.
Commitment to linguistic duality and the influence of both official languages are matters that concern all parliamentarians. This committee is showing that today by taking an interest in the repercussions of the next budget on the 2.5 million French-speaking Canadians living in nine provinces and three territories.
It is with these 2.5 million French-speaking citizens in mind that we prepared the brief you have before you. In their actions, the FCFA and the organizations serving Canada's francophone and Acadian community share one commitment: to ensure that these citizens can live and thrive in French, one of Canada's official languages, through access to a wide variety of services and activities in all aspects of daily life.
Faced with increasingly limited resources, those organizations have come up with innovative solutions and have succeeded, despite everything, in producing real results in the form of services, programs and activities for individuals and families who wish to live in French.
Although insufficient, federal investments intended for those organizations and institutions still provide some leverage. Each dollar invested by the Government of Canada generates at least $8 in volunteer services and enables organizations and institutions to seek out additional funding from other sources. Those investments help the government spend less money on meeting its commitments to francophones in minority communities. Therefore, improving those investments is far from being unreasonable in this time of budget restraint. It is more akin to a strategic realignment of resources.
That's a summary of our brief.
That being said, I would like to raise two issues concerning the ongoing strategic review of current expenditures and programs. First, we were pleased to learn, during a meeting with the Minister of Canadian Heritage, Mr. Moore, that the investments included in the Roadmap for Canada's Linguistic Duality would not be compromised by this exercise. We are talking about the current roadmap. However, yesterday, the Commissioner of Official Languages said something that is relevant to this committee. It was during the launch of his annual report. And I quote:
Departments are being asked to find ways to reduce their expenditures by 5 or 10% [...] The government must ensure that the decisions that are made during each department's budget review take into account potential consequences for official language communities. [...] if each institution independently makes cuts to official languages programs, the cumulative effect will be much greater than 5 or 10%.
We share the commissioner's concern in that respect, and we strongly encourage the committee to take a very close look at that cumulative effect.
We are also interested in other aspects of public funds management, and we want to support the government in its search for ways to save money and increase efficiency. So, I would like to take advantage of my time here to talk about two other important issues.
The first has to do with expectations when it comes to the Canadian government's fund transfers to provinces and territories. Like all Canadians, francophones expect to benefit from those transfers in education, health, human resources development and other areas of activity. The government does include a linguistic clause in some of its agreements. However, those clauses are often very weak.
For instance, that it did not stop the Government of British Columbia from announcing, in October 2010, the closing of five francophone employment centres. They were closed even though they had been created thanks to Service Canada's support and funding provided under an agreement between Human Resources and Skills Development Canada and the provincial government. That also did not stop the Government of Yukon from redirecting funds that had been transferred specifically for French-language education to immersion.
The conclusion is that linguistic clauses, as they are currently worded, do not make it possible to reach the government's efficiency objective and that they must be improved so that the investments reach Canadians, as intended. In addition, this is not an issue limited to official languages. Generally speaking, as soon as the Government of Canada transfers funds—