The point that I was trying to make—and I may have made it badly, so I'll attempt again—is that the English language, as a language, is in danger in Quebec. Part of the reason for it is that, to flourish, language requires that the community, the members who hold that language, be able to conduct many of their daily human activities in their language. In Quebec, because of certain pieces of provincial legislation, members of the English-language community are unable to conduct a lot of their daily activities in English.
I gave the example of the labour force. The largest employer in Quebec is the provincial government. A little more than 13% of the Quebec population are members of the English-speaking minority community. Only 1% of the Quebec provincial public service are members of the English-speaking minority community.
If you, as members of Parliament, support and adopt either government legislation—which I don't believe would ever happen—or a private member's bill that stipulates that federally regulated companies and organizations located in Quebec are subject not to the Official Languages Act but instead to Quebec's provincial language, then you have just taken a whole chunk of the labour force where we will no longer be able to work in our language.
Right now, if you work for the federal government in a department, agency, or company that is federally regulated under the Official Languages Act, you have a right to work in English. That would no longer be the case. Then, what's the point? We educate our children. We hold dearly our schools, which are the only public institutions we now control. We no longer control our hospitals, which our communities raised monies for, established, built, and ran, and did so because our doctors and nurses, who were coming out of universities, were not able to find employment in those health institutions that at the time were largely run by religious orders. We created our own institutions. We created our own rehab centres. Gradually, under the modernization of the infrastructure in Quebec—and it's a good thing—those institutions were declared public and became, many of them, francophone institutions. A very few of the institutions were designated bilingual, and therefore you can continue to work there in English. You can provide the services to the clientele in English.
There is a psychological collective mindset in Quebec, which was largely justified, by the majority community for decades and decades and decades, and that was that their language in Quebec was in peril and the francophone culture in Quebec was in peril. In fact, it was a well justified fear at the time when, prior to the modernization of the Quebec state, virtually all of the levers of power were in the hands of members of the English-speaking minority communities. That is no longer the case. All of the levers are in the hands of the francophone majority. There is a demographer called Richard Bourhis, who specializes in doing scientific study, demographic studies of the English-speaking minority communities of Quebec.
Richard Bourhis has been stating that Quebec is in fact a secure dominant francophone majority and therefore should act as such, which means that the relationship with the English minority community should change inherently.
It's a long discussion. It's not something that we can discuss fully here, but it's something that I would urge the justice committee to ask the official languages committee to take a look at. They should be inviting Richard Bourhis to come and discuss his studies.
