In Quebec, we are an increasingly vulnerable minority. There are fewer and fewer bilingual municipalities. Our school boards are under attack and our schools are closing. Our population is aging. Our jobs are leaving Quebec, and our children are following.
Over a generation, English language film and TV production in Quebec has fallen from 25% of total English language production in Canada to just 7%. On our current trajectory, we can foresee the end of OLMC production in Quebec, and the jobs that such production represents.
Worse, the loss of OLMC production in Quebec will drastically reduce our community’s ability to share our distinct and diverse stories with one another, with other Canadians and the world.
Our communications system, indeed our cultural sovereignty, has never been under greater assault from foreign streaming services than it is now. It has never been easier to be a cultural consumer, streaming more and more content, paying for more and more platforms to deliver it: someone else’s content, someone else’s platforms.
Bill C-10 legislation you are now considering is more desperately needed than anything Parliament has enacted for broadcasting since the establishment of the CBC in 1936.
Yet Canada’s official language minorities are totally absent from this draft of Bill C-10. Despite the parliamentary mandate to support the vitality of official language minorities in the Broadcasting Act and the Official Languages Act, the draft legislation before you fails to even mention us. We ask you to reconsider and to rectify this regrettable oversight. Canadian broadcasting policies must consider the needs of the official language minorities and help us secure our future.