As I said, this is the thing I'm most proud of from the first time I had the privilege of being the Minister of Canadian Heritage. We've worked on co-developing this bill. We didn't agree on everything all the time, which is also normal, but I think we got to a pretty good bill that allowed us right away to start increasing our actions.
To answer your question directly, we've put in place, for example, $840 million for the financing of the projects. If you add to that the fact that we're putting in another $118 million per year, we're getting close to a billion dollars.
Is it enough? I would say that for languages, it will never be enough, because language is who we are. It's our identity. It's our past. It's our present. It's our future. It's how we tell our stories. We pass those stories on to our children.
I'll give you an example. When I came from Argentina.... That's why I have such a strong accent in English—we were political refugees, and I didn't speak a word of French or English. My dad said, “From the door, outside, you speak the language you want. Learn French. Learn English. Learn everything you want, but on this side of the door, inside, it's Spanish.” It was important to him that we keep our culture, just as it is for all of you.
That's what I'm saying. There will never be enough money, because the needs are so big. Of course, we are accelerating the pace, there are more projects, we're financing faster and we're putting in place agreements whereby we're going to transfer that to our friends—the Inuit, the Métis and the first nations—so that they make the decisions and we're not involved anymore.
However, there's so much to do in that, because we have to bring this to another level. It's not only teaching the language. It's also eventually having more music in indigenous languages. It's having more books in indigenous languages. It's having more television shows, more music and more movies at the movie theatre in indigenous languages. That's my dream. That's what I hope for.
We have to start somewhere. I think the start is not that bad. We've funded, I think, 77 different indigenous languages up to now in the different projects.
We appointed the commissioner. We're working with him. He's independent. We're there to support him.
Now we're working on these long-term funding agreements whereby we will transfer a big amount of money to the indigenous organizations. They will be the ones accepting the projects and taking us away from that decision, and I think it's the right thing to do.