Mr. Chair, thank you for this opportunity to speak to you.
My name is Jean Johnson and I am the president of the Association canadienne-française de l'Alberta, ACFA, the organization that speaks on behalf of Alberta francophones.
There are two points I'd like to discuss with you.
The first involves the Canada-Community agreements signed with Heritage Canada. Those agreements are renewed every five years, but the resources have remained at the same level for over 20 years. This has an adverse effect on a francophone community like ours. For 20 years, we have been operating with the same financial resources. Moreover, for 12 years, there has been a phenomenal increase in the French-speaking population in Alberta due to immigration and the secondary migration of Quebec immigrants. People arrive in Quebec, they live there two, three or four years, and then they see Alberta as the ideal economic solution for them.
That is good news, but the challenge this poses is that we have to offer services to these people in just about every sphere of community development, with resources that are already limited. We already have inadequate resources to meet the demand.
Consequently, we ask that our financial resources be increased and that this increase be indexed to the cost of living. I don't think that is an excessive demand. It would mirror the situation of the other francophone communities throughout Canada.
The second element I would like to discuss with you is a form of self-determination. Under our agreements in Alberta we have developed mechanisms and community structures that allow us to have control over decisions involving the distribution of financial resources to community groups. Currently, the mechanism is flawed. We make decisions and recommendations, but people in Ottawa change them because they seem to know our communities better than we do. I am not saying this quite right.
Decisions are made that have negative impacts on the communities. In the community forum, we try to develop a five-year vision. The objectives are reviewed each year for the next five years. In that way we make sure that we are headed in the right direction.
The people from Heritage Canada are never present at these meetings. So they cannot benefit from the exchanges and discussions and be aware of the priorities established by the communities. Ottawa's values are parachuted into the communities even though they do not know our reality at all. We would like a form of self-determination. We want our advocacy organization to sign an agreement under which resources would be transferred to that organization.
You might be surprised to see the reaction of our colleagues from the community groups who see the increase in community resources in a very favourable light, because we have been working for years to become more independent. We have reached a degree of maturity that allows us to take our own affairs in hand.
When we had these discussions, we were asked if we were sure that we wanted to do that, since there could be negative reactions. We simply answered that there were negative reactions already, and that in addition we could not say anything. We can't even tell them what recommendations we made. This creates enormous frustration. If we have to be criticized, we would at least like to have a hand in the decisions.
The question is not about being criticized, but about being able to have an intelligent, meaningful dialogue that will allow our community groups to acquire some autonomy, so that they can reach a certain point.
Those were the points I wanted to share with you.
Thank you for your attention.