Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I'd like to thank our guests for being here this morning.
As you know, it's been a few weeks, a few months even, since we started studying the roadmap. It's always good to receive comments from groups that benefit from the roadmap. It's really the communities you help that benefit from the roadmap.
Ms. Enguehard, you said that it was good to have long-term support, that to have long-term plans of four or five years, it's important to have long-term support, as well as some coordination among the departments. This is what we have tried to put in place. The amount of funding is quite large and, of course, every group always wants more. There was $1.1 billion for five years. So it isn't surprising that the groups that come here always ask that we continue to provide funding and that we even increase it.
There is one group of people that did not come and testify, and that's the taxpayers, those anonymous people who pay out of their pocket so that we can invest in groups through the roadmap.
The backdrop, and the reason I mentioned the taxpayer not being represented here, of course, is the fiscal challenges the government has. It doesn't matter whether it's the United States, France, Spain, Greece, or Quebec—all governments everywhere are wrestling with fiscal challenges. So, ultimately, the question becomes one of priorities.
Every group can say that their group is the priority, but I was wondering if you could just help us, in terms of our evaluation, in thinking through evaluation criteria, without saying “our group is the priority”. Mr. Bélanger can appreciate this, having been in cabinet in the past and their government also faced with that question of prioritization: where do you spend money, which also implies where do you not spend money.
I'll ask maybe each in turn, if you were to put yourself in the shoes of the Department of Heritage and the Minister of Heritage, and thinking about the next version of the road map—there will undoubtedly be a next version of the road map—what would you say the different criteria should be to come up with a plan for determining where to spend money? I'm thinking at a higher level than your own group, putting yourself in the position of, say, that heritage minister.
I'll start with Concordia University. It might be difficult to put you in that position, but it would be useful feedback for us, as an evaluation committee, if you can think about those priorities. You're probably aware that with the road map we're investing in seniors, in youth, in culture, in health—a wide variety of different aspects of the linguistic reality of Canada.