Official Languages committee  Are you talking about the extra step involving the community itself?

Official Languages committee  The communities want to have a say in what goes to the minister in terms of priority of projects. They hold that principle very dearly. One community has decided not to get into that detailed analysis, but 12 others have.

Official Languages committee  I want to tell you that there wasn't any multi-year agreement that overlapped with the new year. I know exactly the situation you're referring to.

Official Languages committee  In actual fact, the 25% has all been paid out. If there are any situations where organizations have not received the payments they were expecting, I'm prepared to check, but I'm virtually certain that this is an incomplete file problem. If you're thinking of the same organization as I am, I know it was late in providing the documents.

Official Languages committee  If we knew the answer as well as we would like, we'd probably do better. It's a multi-faceted issue. Part of it is a question of the numbers of students who do learn the second language--and it varies across the provinces--and how they learn the second language. We know, for instance, that most children in Canada learn French—and I'm now talking about the kids in Quebec learning English—in what we call core French, which is not proving very effective.

Official Languages committee  I'll answer this question, Mr. Lemieux. The program will be launched on April 1. It is already open for submissions. Basically, we will try to do two things. First, we want to support community cultural projects that can have a long-term impact on community vitality. Some projects are for all of Canada and others are local projects.

Official Languages committee  They do absolutely, and it is over and above what you refer to when you say that the heritage programs and the agency programs already support minority community cultural projects.

Official Languages committee  To repeat what the minister said earlier, it is the responsibility of the board of Radio-Canada to manage that corporation. However, to respond to your question, Radio-Canada is a designated institution for the purposes of the administration of Part VII of the Official Languages Act, which the Department of Canadian Heritage is responsible for coordinating.

Official Languages committee  Indeed, and the action plan reinforced the phenomenon that Jean-Bernard described, which has to do with the fact that Canadian Heritage is one federal player among others, which are increasingly important, including Health Canada and Citizenship and Immigration Canada, and so on.

Official Languages committee  Yes, when you mention those figures—I believe we had an exchange on that subject last time—that was essential funding... The major part of the action plan was allocated to education. Certain education budgets expired early in the 2000s, so it wasn't anticipated that they would be renewed.

Official Languages committee  I don't really know what you're referring to, what report you're reading. However, there have been changes in the way the annual report is designed, because the programs changed in 2003. There are now two official languages support programs, whereas I don't know how many there were—six or seven—before that.

Official Languages committee  Yes, there are mechanisms in that respect. There is a coordinators network, including in the regions, that ensures that everyone knows what the communities want and acts as a switchboard. Perhaps Jean-Bernard could say more on how that works in the Atlantic region. It's a bit different in each region.

Official Languages committee  To date, when I've had to answer questions of that kind, they were about the size of the general envelope allocated to one province in particular. So you're asking a question that concerns the contribution made to one of the members of the provincial networks, the Townshippers. I don't know what factors prevailed when it came to determining the funding granted to the Townshippers.

Official Languages committee  Yes, the dynamic of the Eastern Townships is really interesting. It's a demographically declining community, one of Quebec's traditionally anglophone communities where they're experiencing that phenomenon, which is quite frequent in the entire region east of Montreal and in the anglophone school system.

Official Languages committee  Not directly, to the extent that the Canada-community agreements are expiring. They should have been renewed or something else should have been done, whether or not there was a plan.