Official Languages Committee on Feb. 25th, 2014

[Sylvia Martin-Laforge]

Absolutely, and in our community development plan that we came out with in March 2012, economic prosperity is one of our priorities—so economic prosperity as a priority, then the plan, and then implementation.

I don't know if that's simple, but....

[Manon Perreault, NDP, Montcalm, QC]

However, the 2012 plan was targeting economic prosperity for anglophones in Quebec, wasn't it?

[Sylvia Martin-Laforge]

We're asking for a plan for Quebec. Any insertion of resources or expertise into creating a plan for Quebec is important. It can come from anywhere. It could come from the province if we could get them to accept that we need a plan in Quebec. I think now that a plan is on the table and people are talking about a plan, there could be a plan for official language minority communities outside Quebec in each of the regions. I don't know how that would work. But certainly, if somebody is talking about a plan for official language minority communities in Quebec, QCGN is right there wanting to be part of that plan with our groups.

[The Chair, Conservative, Michael Chong]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Williamson.

[John Williamson, Conservative, New Brunswick Southwest, NB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Good day. It's been interesting to hear from you. I'm from New Brunswick, which is a bilingual province, and I was struck by your comments on the Canada job grant and the ability of your community to potentially utilize that opportunity because of the direct federal government approach on this. I thought that was interesting, and I wanted to highlight it. I suspect that might benefit other minority-language groups across the country as well. I don't know that, but we'll hear from other witnesses.

Mr. Thompson, could I ask you to, as briefly as you can, put on the record the difference between median and average income?

[Stephen Thompson]

There are two warriors in the conversation in Quebec. One is a demographer named Castonguay, and the other is Jack Jedwab. Every time these numbers come out, there's a big fight in the press.

Median income is the income at which 50% of the incomes are above and 50% of the incomes are below. It is a much better indicator of what the average person makes than the mean.

The mean takes the lowest and the highest incomes, subtracts it and divides it by two. So if you have a great deal of economic disparity, a lot of very rich people, it will bring up the mean income and it will give you a false picture. It will make the people in the community look like they have a higher income than they actually do.

So a median is a much more accurate way, from a social science and policy perspective, to measure income in a given cohort.

[John Williamson, Conservative, New Brunswick Southwest, NB]

Thank you.

Ms. Martin-Laforge, you were saying the goal here is economic opportunity and prosperity. You've talked about program delivery being important. What we've not talked about is the other side of that equation, the importance of the tax regime, the regulatory regime, that impacts communities. Because on the one hand the government can give, but it's very good at taking as well.

Could either of you comment a bit about that approach to job creation opportunities, and if you consider that to be important as well in growth and long-term prosperity?

[Sylvia Martin-Laforge]

I worked many years ago when there were tax credits. I saw the benefits of tax credits. There are fors and againsts around tax credits. One of the things we thought we had been successful with was when we asked the provincial government how they could help the English-speaking community of Quebec, and the Liberals, who were looking to be elected, said they would consider tax credits for English-speaking youth. It doesn't have to be English-speaking, but you know, that's when something happens, when people have incentives. There are good examples of incentives working in target communities. We see specific programs for aboriginals. Tax incentives...for a time, and they have to prove themselves, but I think tax credits could work.

[John Williamson, Conservative, New Brunswick Southwest, NB]

Thank you.

Mr. Thompson, there was an interesting comment about the makeup of the income. Are we talking family income or individual income? Individual, okay. What factor do new Canadians have on these figures? You're going to have what I'll call the old stock anglophone community, and then you're going to have new Canadians who have arrived in Quebec. Have you considered the impact?

[Stephen Thompson]

We could certainly provide those figures. I could do that analysis and provide that analysis. We have those numbers.

[John Williamson, Conservative, New Brunswick Southwest, NB]

Sure, I'd like that. Can you give any comments just off the top of your head?

[Stephen Thompson]

It's funny, we have right here—this is for tomorrow's presentation to your colleagues—a workshop report, “Quebec's English Speaking Immigrants and Poverty: Sharing our analysis and building a research agenda”. So we have research on poverty within the English-speaking immigrant population. We also have the data from the NHS. So we have good data on that. They generally do poorer, of course. Immigrants tend not to do as well as indigenous populations.

[John Williamson, Conservative, New Brunswick Southwest, NB]

In your experience, is that overcome after a generation or two?

[Stephen Thompson]

The third generation.

[John Williamson, Conservative, New Brunswick Southwest, NB]

By the third generation.

[Sylvia Martin-Laforge]

It's a long time.

[John Williamson, Conservative, New Brunswick Southwest, NB]

Yes, it is in fact a complex problem. The language component is one aspect, and then of course there's the influx of new Canadians as well to complicate it.

I have no further questions. Do you have any other comments you want to make on anything else? No.

[The Chair, Conservative, Michael Chong]

Thank you, Mr. Williamson.

Monsieur Godin.

[Yvon Godin, NDP, Acadie—Bathurst, NB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Mr. Thompson, you said that Quebec was the only place where the anglophone community had no relationship with the province. I must go back to that, because I disagree with you. We must look at the situation of francophones in the rest of Canada. In several places in Canada, that relationship is not there either.

Take Alberta, for example.

When you have a company that puts a job posting through the federal government and in the request for the language there are four different languages and French is not in it, and then after that they go as far as saying, even if you don't speak French it's okay because you work by group.... I have people down home who go there to work, and they're being told that the name Clément is too French to have a job there. I'm telling you, we have a big problem in this country, not only in Quebec. I just want to correct that.

[Stephen Thompson]

If I can respond then, our purpose here is to talk about our community and not about minority communities in other jurisdictions. My specific point on that was in Alberta there's a Francophone Secretariat where the francophone community in Alberta can go to the Francophone Secretariat under the Alberta French language services act and they can talk to the Government of Alberta about the problems that they have receiving services in their official language with the Government of Alberta.

That mechanism does not exist in Quebec for our community. I'm not saying that things are better or worse in other jurisdictions. What I'm saying is that we do not have the mechanism in Quebec for our community to talk to the Government of Quebec. It doesn't exist.

[Yvon Godin, NDP, Acadie—Bathurst, NB]

Okay, and I don't want to start to pick a fight over this here, but I just want to get that straight. It looks like it's kind of painting Quebec as not doing...and I'm looking across the country. I'm telling you it's shameful. It's unbelievable. It's discriminatory. It's just unbelievable, and I hope I will prove that one day, because I even had to go to the Commissioner of Official Languages to create a study on it. It's just like they're telling the francophones in Alberta, if you speak French you don't have a job. If the language here you speak is English, you have other people from other countries coming in and they could speak their language on the job, but the francophone is not allowed to do it, and we will prove that one day.

The question that I want to bring up here is about job training, and Mr. Williamson was talking about it. He was happy, but how could we be happy when all the provinces, not just Quebec but all the provinces across the country, are saying the new plan is not good, because the new plan on the training program is to give money, really, to big business, which gets money to train their people. What about the ones in the community we're talking about? What about the one in the basement who would like to have a job, and what about the people in the community who want to create jobs and have the government help to train people in the community, where the small business in the community doesn't have the $5,000 for the 20 people they want to hire?

I think that's where the program goes wrong when you remove the money from the community, because the federal government doesn't go there. It's not their responsibility to do job training, but somebody has to do it.

[Stephen Thompson]

It's an argument, I suppose.

First of all, our understanding is that the $350 million that we're talking about was money additional to the labour force agreements, and that this is federal money that was put in after to specifically address unemployment challenges after the 2008 crash. They're not taking away long-standing programs. This is extra money they put in and now they are bringing it out.

So, what the federal—

[Yvon Godin, NDP, Acadie—Bathurst, NB]

No, they are not. They're removing money. That's why the province is negotiating right now. Minister Kenney has said directly that it's going to be his way or the highway. It finally looked like they were coming to an agreement, but the pressure was put pretty hard on the community and on the province to remove some of the money from the grant they were receiving.

[Stephen Thompson]

I guess our position would still remain that from our community's perspective this is a good thing because English-speaking businesses and English-speaking job seekers will have easier access to public resources in the official language of their choice.

For us, it's not a matter of cutting it out. It's just a matter of accessing the service. That's our priority. Having the program delivered through Service Canada is more beneficial to our community. That's our position.

[Yvon Godin, NDP, Acadie—Bathurst, NB]

Do you believe it will be delivered by the government, or is it just going to be a program where you have to go see the province for $5,000? That's the program Mr. Williamson was talking about—$5,000 comes from the federal government, $5,000 comes from the provincial government, and $5,000 comes from the business. That's where the $15,000 comes from.

It's not money coming into the community from the federal government. It's not money coming to them to create these education and training programs so that people can get jobs. Do you understand, that's what the program is?