Official Languages committee  In addition...

Official Languages committee  It will be my pleasure to discuss this matter with the opposition.

Official Languages committee  And in fact, the critic Steven Blaney asked me another question about official languages since his appointment to this file.

Official Languages committee  There was a lot of inertia on the part of the Conservative government.

Official Languages committee  Since you have opened that door, dear colleague, and in order to show you to what extent official languages are not a priority for the current Conservative opposition, the last time the expression “official languages” was used by your political party in the House goes back to last May.

Official Languages committee  The Conservative opposition did not really provide any direction in the matter of official languages.

Official Languages committee  Yes. I was asked a question and I was answering it.

Official Languages committee  Thank you, dear colleague. Congratulations again for all the leadership you're showing to support the anglophone community in Quebec. It is very important. Regarding education in general, first of all, we've stabilized funding that will be sent to provinces and territories. That was really important to us.

Official Languages committee  What we've heard is that anglophone communities, English-speaking communities in Quebec have specific needs. In particular, the ones outside Montreal really need our support because they don't necessarily have access to many services in the official language of their choice. Therefore, we decided to provide a specific funding mechanism, which is $5 million to support English-speaking communities, and that will be to the benefit of the communities.

Official Languages committee  I'm very happy to be able to defend official languages with a strong voice within Cabinet. I am also very happy to have a Prime Minister who believes in the importance of official languages. He has indeed invested in an important action plan, but also committed to more protection for official languages, as well as for official language minority communities, by launching the process to modernize the Official Languages Act.

Official Languages committee  ... do better. All of the members here, around the table, would agree that we can always do better. However, we have shown, be it through the Action Plan, the review of the Official Languages Regulations or the modernization of the act, to what extent this dossier is a priority for us.

Official Languages committee  We feel it is very important that bilingual services be offered, both in the public service and at the Canada Infrastructure Bank. That is why we committed to a real improvement in service provision, notably in those provided by the Infrastructure Bank. We are very happy to have appointed a francophone Quebecker to the bank's management.

Official Languages committee  ... the current linguistic quality of services offered by the bank were not up to expectations. He committed to remedying that, and of course I am going to work with him to ensure that the bank complies with its obligations under the act.

Official Languages committee  It will be my pleasure to receive your letter and to reply to it. We have brought in various measures, because we find it important that our minority official language communities have access to bilingual services. We feared that the low demographic weight of francophones in some regions of the country would hamper the provision of bilingual services, because of Official Languages Regulations provisions that required a certain percentage of francophones in minority situations in a given region, in order to offer services in French.

Official Languages committee  Pardon?