I will respond to your first question regarding the statement that immigrants are more mobile. The mobility rate for individuals born in Canada is 85% and this rate varies greatly from one region to another. We are making our comparison at that level.
With regard to the plan and our experience of the past few years, we decided to redefine the standard on francophone immigration. By redefining the standard, we are no longer talking about immigrants who voluntarily report having knowledge of French. We are now talking about immigrants whose mother tongue is not French, but whose first official language is French.
What we want are immigrants who will use French, who will settle in francophone communities and contribute to the vitality of those communities. After a few years, we realized that, based on available statistics, those who voluntarily reported having knowledge of French or English often had only a limited knowledge of French. Therefore, those individuals would not settle in francophone communities and live in French. We know that the availability of data is limited and I want to talk about this later.
Page 4 of the strategic plan reads as follows:
The Strategic Plan modifies the definition of the term “French-speaking immigrant” as an immigrant whose mother tongue is French, or whose first official language is French if the mother tongue is a language other than French or English.
Based on the former definition, the one to which Ms. Barbot is referring, we nearly reached our objectives at least twice in the past four years. However, we know full well that this definition will not give us the kind of French-speaking immigrants we want. Why?