Official Languages committee  Are you talking about funding for official language minority communities in Quebec?

Official Languages committee  The funding is there to support English‑speaking communities. It's only natural that this funding supports English. It supports a number of projects—

Official Languages committee  For English‑speaking Quebeckers, the fragility doesn't lie in language, but in community vitality. Our communities need support. There are issues, as I said, including poverty.

Official Languages committee  I'm a researcher, not a politician. I find it hard to say whether this is fair. I think that this is about individual researchers applying for funding. So, it's—

Official Languages committee  Mr. Beaulieu, I gather that you're talking about research funding. You aren't talking about funding for infrastructure or program spending.

Official Languages committee  I would like to make a comment. We're very proud of the fact that we work with several community groups, including the QCGN, to understand our community's priorities. That said, we're independent of the QCGN and any other community group.

Official Languages committee  Yes. I would like to address a general perception. One of the issues that Patrick and I face as historians working on the topic of English-speaking Quebec is that, unfortunately, there's a prevalent and much outdated perspective that English-speaking Quebec is a privileged group that doesn't need support.

Official Languages committee  There are none that I know of.

Official Languages committee  My apologies, but I am not here to reflect on the entire university sector. I really hope that the university presidents representing English-language universities in Quebec get the chance to present this type of information to your committee.

Official Languages committee  We would like to see the research ecosystem—the networks of universities, colleges, professors, students and others who do research on Quebec's official language minority communities—receive steady, ongoing support so that we can answer the kinds of questions that are being asked today, which we're unable to answer due to funding that is not continuous and that is hard for us to depend on from year to year.

Official Languages committee  As I said, the issue is too complex for me to speak to.

Official Languages committee  Yes.

Official Languages committee  Yes.

Official Languages committee  That's a very complex question. If we're talking about the number of speakers whose mother tongue is French, French is indeed in decline. As for the use of French in Quebec, according to a recent study by the Office québécois de la langue française, or OQLF, it remains stable.

Official Languages committee  I have good news on this point, since more and more anglophones have become bilingual—