It has been proven — and the committee has said so — that it is more difficult to reach minority communities, namely French-speaking communities outside of Quebec. It is much more difficult to target them, to inform them of all the programs and services provided by the government.
With respect to the idea of equivalency, when a firm prepares a promotion campaign on television, for example an ad by the Department of Health, the firm is hired to do advertising for television, nothing more. In its planning, there is no talk about including newspapers, radio or other forms of media; it's television only, nothing more.
How many francophones outside Quebec have access to television and listen to programs in French? It's hard to know. So these people don't have that information.
So we are proposing that the firm be obligated to use most of its budget for its television campaign, but that it systematically ad, in each of its add campaigns, a small portion of its budget for placing ads in community newspapers and on community radio. Even by doing that, they will not end up with the same level of media coverage, but they will come closer to equivalency.
In this way, we will obtain a portion of the budget that will be justified and that will be used to inform people of whatever the government wants to inform them. A quarter on an eighth of a page will be purchased in a French-language newspaper and, for a week, a quarter of a page in the Globe and Mail. Anglophones will have seen the information five times; francophones, half a time. That is what we're talking about when we say equivalency: systematically including official language minority media in all campaigns.
