Quebec has Bill 101. It has its own charter of rights, and in the charter of rights there is a section that recognizes the existence of the English-speaking minority communities, and recognizes our right to continue to thrive.
I have to bring it back to what was stated by the previous panel; you have rights that governments adopt on paper, but lived experience does not always match up.
In terms of the signing issues, it's really not a major issue these days except primarily in one area, and that's in the area of health services. The issue of having equal access to health services and social services in the English language flares up again and again. There is a process that exists in Quebec to ensure that every single health establishment has a policy and a program to ensure that the clients they serve can receive their service in English.
There was recently a major health reform in Quebec that established new integrated health and social services centres, called “integrated university health and social services”. Existing establishments, rehab centres, long-term care facilities, hospitals, and so on, were regrouped by geographical territory. As a result, we are now in the process—if I take the island of Montreal for example—of redeveloping the process to establish the regional committee for Montreal for access to English services in health and social services program.
That's a whole process and I'm part of that process because I'm vice-president of the board of one of the largest CIUSSS. That's what we call them on the island of Montreal, and that CIUSSS is going to be responsible, under the law, for appointing the members to the regional access program committee, which will oversee all of that.
Yes, there are issues, and on that level the issues are being handled, and we hope that it will be successful.
Where we have an issue is with Bill 86, a new educational bill that completely reforms our structures and abolishes school boards, school board elections, and overhauls everything. Many constitutional experts believe that it violates section 23 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the English-speaking community's constitutional guarantee to control and manage education. Given that our schools and school boards are the sole public institutions that our minority community continues to control and to manage, that would spell death. A court challenges program, reinstated and re-enhanced, would go a long way towards providing our communities with the necessary tools to contest that legislation if the government proceeds with it, adopts it at the National Assembly, and then begins to implement it.
Right now, nothing's happening because it hasn't been adopted. It's still before the National Assembly.
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