Canadian Heritage Committee on Nov. 20th, 2006

[Suzanne Roy]

Since the province isn't bilingual, we must absolutely ensure that things happen properly. We're currently seeing problems in Sudbury, a problem with the Job Connect program, among other things, all these employment assistance services that will be grouped together not under the aegis of Francophone and Anglophone organizations, but under that of a currently bilingual organization, the YMCA, whose French-language programs leave quite a bit to be desired. People have already been told that it's preferable for them to submit their CVs in English because that's the way to do things in order to enter the labour market. They're already being encouraged to work and do things in English, instead of showing up as Francophones and being recognized as such.

[Maka Kotto, Bloc, Saint-Lambert, QC]

Okay.

I've been here on the Hill for two years and I haven't had the opportunity to meet you.

I'd like to know whether you've previously been called upon to conduct the exercise you're doing here today. Are the battles you're waging to ensure your survival as a specific group in your region recurring?

[Suzanne Roy]

It wasn't that way in the past; it was done much more informally and through direct contact. It was done somewhat through the provincial ACFO, which no longer exists. And the AFO, the Assemblée de la francophonie de l'Ontario, which we should be able to rely on, is still being structured. So there should eventually be some advances, but for the moment, it's still... I'm the representative of the community development sector at the AFO, and it wasn't the AFO that took this action.

[Maka Kotto, Bloc, Saint-Lambert, QC]

Yes, but it appears from the information I have that you're always conducting a battle for your survival.

[Pierre Bélanger]

You're entirely right: it's constant. You know, the organizations in the field are the ones with the biggest problems, whose existence is very precarious. We've been doing this work for 10 or 15 years, since the major government cuts started. We nearly shut down operations in 1998. With a grant of $30,000, we had no more full-time employees and we had to appeal to the community. Fortunately, we were able to gather $14,000 or $15,000, but the time we spend preparing projects so that we can survive, trying to find administrative personnel, the time we spend raising money, isn't time spent working effectively, providing services.

The downloading of provincial government services — the situation Suzanne spoke about — has resulted in a terrible situation because it's a constant struggle, and, ultimately, we wind up operating with organizations that are not that bilingual. We're redoing the work that was previously done when we fought for Bill 8, the Ontario French-Language Services Act; we're restarting the work that was previously done at the provincial level. The former Conservative government of Mr. Harris is the one that gave the municipalities responsibility for many services. I don't know whether the municipalities were able to provide the services, whether they had the funds to do so. The fight is very tough because we're in a minority situation.

[Maka Kotto, Bloc, Saint-Lambert, QC]

As the saying goes, there is always someone is worse shape than oneself.

Are you envious when you draw a parallel with Quebec's Anglophone community?

[Pierre Bélanger]

We're envious, but that's a good thing. Despite what can be said about the Government of Quebec, it treats its Anglophone minority well. They've had their education system in both languages for a long time, from primary school to university. In Quebec, the Anglophone minority has all its essential institutions, be they hospitals or community colleges. It's a model for us, and we're happy that they're well treated. A democracy is measured by the way it treats its minorities.

We continue our fight, but we fundamentally believe that the future of the country depends on the vitality and development of the Francophone communities outside Quebec. We fought for Montfort Hospital and so on, but an enormous amount of work remains to be done because our situation is really precarious. Outside the centres where Francophones are in the majority, the assimilation rate is 30%. That's an endless struggle. We never make any progress, and we still have to fight for our rights.

[Maka Kotto, Bloc, Saint-Lambert, QC]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Schellenberger]

Thank you.

Mr. Angus is next.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I recognize that ACFO makes an enormous contribution to all the northern communities, but I was very surprised to learn that there was a lack of funding for your organization, in particular in Kirkland Lake. You have to meet the needs of a number of small rural and remote Francophone communities with a budget of $18,000.

With an $18,000 budget, how can you meet the language, cultural, health and general service needs of the Francophones in that region?

[Pierre Bélanger]

I'm going to ask Suzanne to answer your question.

[Suzanne Roy]

We can't make any predictions because we're in reaction and survival mode.

You mentioned Kirkland Lake, but we've just shut down in Sault Ste. Marie. The Sault Ste. Marie ACFO didn't have enough staff to work in a place that was quite unique because the city has declared itself unilingual Anglophone. We really need a lot of people to work in the field because it's a very tough environment, but we can't get enough support. It's not even a matter of developing health services; we're just doing basic work right now. We're trying to work together with the community, but we're finding it hard to do so. It's even harder to identify the major projects and major problems.

[Pierre Bélanger]

In Cochrane and Iroquois Falls, it nearly had to shut down. Service Canada had to introduce a project, but there wasn't any administrative staff to run it. We're talking about providing training and services to communities that are still hard-hit by the lumber crisis, which has also hit Smooth Rock Falls. So we're in a strange situation.

In Timmins, the work remains to be done. The town has approximately 45,000 inhabitants, 19,000 of whom are Francophones. There's no Francophone community health centre to do prevention or provide services in French. A committee has to be organized to redo all the feasibility studies in order to obtain those services. We're lacking Francophone doctors. In fact, we're simply lacking doctors.

The needs are obvious, and now that the major battles have been fought for education and health services, we view ourselves as agents of economic development. We're not asking for charity; we simply want what is owed us according to the ideal that's been set at the language level and at Canadian Heritage. We sort of represent the fibre of Canada. We want to be able to do our job to adequately develop our communities in northern Ontario in order to prevent our young people from migrating. There are economic diversification projects in tourism and other fields, but we can't make adequate progress.

Now is the time to do it. Global economic circumstances call for economic diversification, which means more manpower training. For example, in Timmins, there is a French-language college that's completely inadequate. We need 65,000 people to work in the mining and forestry sectors, but we aren't able to train them because we don't have either the institutions or the qualified personnel to do it.

We're fighting because we want to contribute to the economic vitality of our communities, and not simply that of the Francophone communities.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

We're talking about the relationship between ACFO and the cultural or linguistic issues, but I'd like to discuss the relationship between a very strong Francophone identity and economic development in the northern part of the province. For example, for northeastern Ontario and Abitibi-Témiscamingue, the natural market is the same. It's the same economy, the same culture, the same issues.

Can you give us examples of economic success in the case of the Ontario communities that promote Francophone identity?

[Pierre Bélanger]

In Témiscamingue, there's the Foire gourmande, a tourist and gastronomical project that was developed on both sides of the border by the Anglophones and Francophones of Temiskaming in Ontario and the Francophones of Témiscamingue on the Quebec side. It's a success. These people won the gold medal for the tourism project of the year in Quebec. I think they were finalists at the national level. A total of 50,000 persons visited the Foire Gourmande this summer. The event was spread over five days.

We have a problem in Canada: we have a free trade agreement with the United States, but we're not even trying to reach one that really works among the provinces. We're letting golden economic opportunities go by. There are approximately 200,000 Francophones in northern Ontario. We represent value-added, an asset for tourism and creativity. We should be able to work more in a synergistic way with northern Quebec. We share the same reality, and we operate in the same economic sectors. And yet the project is still undeveloped. Everything remains to be done. As far as we're concerned, we view ourselves in a way as orchestra conductors on these projects.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Schellenberger]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Fast is next.

[Ed Fast, Conservative, Abbotsford, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Thank you to both of you for coming this afternoon.

I noticed, Mr. Bélanger, you made reference to the fact that it's becoming more difficult for you to...I believe the term you used was “fight assimilation”.

[Pierre Bélanger]

Yes.

[Ed Fast, Conservative, Abbotsford, BC]

I'm assuming that by “assimilation” you mean specifically the loss of language, the official language being French.

I would like to refer you again to the graph that you gave to us. Around 1997 there appears to have been a fairly significant drop in funding on both counts, whether allowing for inflation or not. Have you been involved with your organization long enough to understand some of the rationale behind those funding cuts? What were the reasons for those funding cuts? I don't know what they were.

[Pierre Bélanger]

Well, basically, if you recall, there was a big cleanup to be made in the government's finances in the nineties. There were deficits; deficit after deficit. I think the rationale of the government was that every program had to be cut to do its share of the hard work that had to be done.

We may agree on the principle, but some areas need to be protected. They need to make their fair share, but they also need to be protected because of the work they do, their pluses and the effect of what they're doing in the communities.

That year was a particularly tough year, and it was not because we hadn't presented good projects, because if you follow that graph, every peak of the different projects we prepared related to the community and the needs of the city. The second one here was a project that was designed to protect old people against violence and fraud. We were working with a formation program to give experience to our francophone youth. We were working with the Timmins police corps so we could register all the bicycles, because there were maybe stolen bicycles. We handmade the project. It was really linked to the needs of our community, not only the francophones.

But you know, when you work project by project, you see the bottom part coming afterwards. You can't develop projects every year, because you don't have the manpower to do so, and you don't necessarily have the money to do so. Even though we had good projects, or if we had been more efficient and had done something positive for our community, it didn't mean or wouldn't have meant that the next year we would have had more funds. The rationale of cuts simply continued. It got a bit better by the end, but still, as you noticed with the other graph, to be able to just function with the means we had in 1985, we should have gotten raises in our basic funding. And we didn't get them.

It's like the tax we developed for the First World War: once you're in a pattern, it's tough to get out of it. If you recall, income taxes on individuals and businesses were supposedly temporary. They ended up not being temporary, but being the real thing. Now they're tough to get back.

And you know, it's normal. Governments were scared of overspending, because there were spending sprees in the seventies. Every government wanted to make sure they would get the extra mile for their bucks. I agree with that, but we thought they would have recognized the efficient work we were doing with the few funds we were getting. We're exceptionally efficient, but we can't go on; people are tired. We've asked the community year after year to help us financially, but the pie is not growing bigger and all these organizations are playing for the same pie.

I don't know if I've been clear, but now we need to have a global strategy, otherwise we will miss the boat—the formation, the economic diversification, and the out-migration of our youth elsewhere in the province.

[Ed Fast, Conservative, Abbotsford, BC]

My follow-up question comes out of my own experience. I'm bilingual, but not in French, actually in German. The community I come from on the west coast considered that protecting the German language was of enough importance that my family, parents, extended family, and many other families in my area actually put significant dollars into making sure we had that German-language education.

Of course in your case it's even more important, because French is one of the two official languages and we want to make sure we protect it.

I do notice from your second graph that there's a significant component of local fundraising involved. Correct?

[Pierre Bélanger]

Exactly, because we did our share of work.

[Ed Fast, Conservative, Abbotsford, BC]

Yes, but I do notice it has remained relatively static over the years.

Again, in exploring ways of how this maybe can be done better and how we can get more value for money—and I'm not committing our government to this at all, because this is just an exploration—would there be any objection on the part of either of you to the notion of perhaps tying increased funding for official languages to an increased level of local fundraising? Whether it's on a one-to-one or two-to-one or three-to-one basis, forget about the formula, but what do you think about the notion of both parties perhaps working to develop a strategy to improve funding for official languages?

[Pierre Bélanger]

It would be complicated, and I'll explain why. In a community such as Timmins, we had a good sector of the forest industry. It was owned by a francophone from Timmins. But he had takeovers. These people grow old. I'm talking about Malette Lumber Inc., which is really, really big. Now parts of it have been sold to Columbia Forest Products, which is an American company. Parts of it have been sold to Tembec. They're not from our community. They don't care that much about what's going on. And especially, they're not francophones either.

The same problem occurred in Hearst, because down there you had all the Levesques and the Lecours, who used to own the economy, and basically 90% of the sector. Now it's Columbia and Grant, and these people are not from the north.

That's the problem we face, and that's why we're static, because there's so much you can get out in dollars and it all depends on the economic strength of your community. Now there's a big crisis in the forestry industry and we're going downwards, because some of these businesses simply closed and some are being bought by multinational corporations that don't see much importance in taking care of the French community. That's why the government has a very important role to play.

What I would attach to it is results. If you're using the public's money, we agree with the principle that you have to do something with it, something efficient, something that's really connected to the needs of the community. That's why I like that graph, because with everything you see there, we did our job. We delivered the merchandise; we delivered the goods. That's why we're here. If we didn't believe we were spending the taxpayers' money adequately, we would not face this committee.

You know what it is? Some of the MPs around the table are from western Canada, from small cities. You know how tough it is to deal with a government when you're not close to it. That's our problem. We're so far up north that it's not easy for us to get the help we need, to talk to the right people and get the right connections.

Suzanne, do you want to follow up on that?

[Suzanne Roy]

There might be some problems in this with some of the communities, such as Sault Ste. Marie, for example, where, if you're francophone, you would need to go deep to get some other funding. Eventually we might get to that point, but at this point it might be something very difficult. In Toronto, for another example, the diversity of the francophone community might not be the best way to try to get some extra dollars. It's feasible for Sudbury, it might be feasible for Timmins, but it's not feasible for everywhere. This would need to be worked, and I don't know how, but I don't see at this point something developing in this sort of way.