Good afternoon. I'm going to add to what Mr. Bélanger said.
The purpose of the ACFOs is to provide the community with the necessary tools for its development and to ensure its vitality. We obviously want to achieve tangible and sustainable results. The ACFOs are still the only organizations in the province that have a community development mandate for the entire community they represent. In general, groups engage in development within very limited communities. Seniors work with seniors, youths with youths. We, on the other hand, have a duty to serve the community as a whole.
It is therefore essential that we project a very positive image of the work done in the field, and the perception of that work is currently very wrong. We hear it said that a large number of volunteers are working in the field, but this isn't volunteer work that we're doing; it's support work to ensure the vitality of the Francophone community.
Greater recognition for the Francophone community and its organizations is thus fundamentally important. We want to be able to live in French right across Ontario. That isn't the situation at the moment. Community development is done differently in Toronto, which has its own particular characteristics, in Sudbury, which is a major centre and in Thunder Bay, which is remote, or in all the little towns like Kirkland Lake and Hearst, where a majority of Francophones live. So you can't compare what's being done and what succeeds in one place and automatically want to introduce it elsewhere. That's not realistic.
Every community is responsible for its own development and vitality and must identify its own needs. That's where the ACFOs come into play, that is to say when each community defines its own particular characteristics. We do development based on the community's actual needs. Those needs are expressed in the field, at the grassroots level.
We talked about accomplishments. There have obviously been a number of them. We recall the creation of French-language divisions within school boards, the opening of community radio stations — achievements that are still hard to subsidize — the establishment of French-language health networks. A lot of things have been done, but a lot of things remain to be done because there's probably been a regression in recent years. We're facing increasing challenges and we want to continue to ensure the vitality of our respective communities.
The restructuring of the association movement has been harmful, the downloading of services and government restructurings has been very harmful to the association movement and has considerably weakened the ACFOs in the field. What we're asking is that you promote sustainable long-term development through a fair funding formula: we're asking for operating grants, not project grants, multi-year funding so that we don't have to go through the same process every year. To secure a grant of $10,000, $15,000, $20,000, $30,000 or $40,000 for the luckiest organizations, the administrative maze we have to go through is unthinkable.
We also want to promote the establishment of a provincial coalition of ACFOs, financially supported, because that no longer exists. The provincial ACFO had that mandate a number of years ago. Over time, the provincial ACFO became more important than the regional ACFOs alone, and the new organization in place now has a community development sector, but it isn't structured and it's under-funded. This is the sector that represents the largest number of members. Everyone, the entire community falls into that sector.
Another tool that could be very promising, and that we're requesting, is support for training the program officers of the Department of Canadian Heritage. That department used to have development officers who worked with the communities, whereas now it has program officers who work in an office. Those officers must be able to tell the difference between community development and development projects.
To ensure project development, there must be adequate operating funding so that we can go after projects and programs that will support the work we're doing at the grassroots level.
I'm ready to answer your questions.