Well, it's important, because if.... How do I say this? There are people of long-standing French lineage who live in communities that are seeing the francophone fact just slowly disappear and then kind of go away. You have people who might have last names like Leblanc ou Laframboise but who are English-speaking in their day-to-day lives because the French fact hasn't continued in operation.
That's partly why, in the feuille de route, for example, regional economic development agencies have funds—right, Hubert? He and I had a long conversation about that the other day.
That's one of the reasons why Western Economic Diversification, for example, is part of the feuille de route for official languages. They have set aside funding with the goal—frankly, the results are mixed—to support businesses that are operating in an official-language minority context and encourage them to be able to continue to provide that business experience and to continue to move forward so that we can protect the French fact.
I have to say that I don't want the experience I'm having in my home community of Maillardville to be the norm in the rest of the country. Maillardville is a community within the city of Coquitlam. The city of Coquitlam has about 130,000 people. Maillardville is the largest francophone settlement west of the Red River. It's quaint and it's cute. There are a lot of people there with French last names.
My alma mater, Maillardville junior secondary, is the best French immersion junior high school there, but Maillardville itself has almost become boutique. You go there and you see some French architecture, and you buy some bread, or you go to the Festival du Bois, but there isn't actually a vibrant French community there. It has just sort of withered away over time by population growth and the lack of a coherent strategy for the French fact there—other than for tourism: come and see what a French community lived like 200 years ago.
Well, that and fifty cents will get you a cup of coffee. I'd rather have a community that is vibrant and strong, that may be limited in numbers but that shows anglophone Canadians who live in the adjacent areas that you can live and be prosperous in two official languages; that actually you will have a bigger market for your goods; that you will have more social opportunities; that you might have better advancement in life if you are able to interact with people in more than one language; that this is a good thing, and here's a local example. Multiply it onto a global stage, and you can see that you're better off learning French.
We haven't done a great job of this in a lot of communities. Part of the road map is to do that, to have vibrant communities, not boutique communities, and have them grow across the country.
I think we're seeing results, based on my experience. And as you said, you have experiences in your riding. It's really important to try to engender that genuine health.