In Nova Scotia, our biggest success is the partnership we've achieved with the province. We often talk about the influence of policies.
Mr. Lemieux, we hope that what you hear today will help you and that perhaps you'll talk to the government. I hope that that “perhaps” becomes a “yes”, that you'll convince your government after hearing the communities.
The provincial partnership is a major success. We're increasingly recognized and we're consulted because we work with them in good faith. We want to work in good faith for the community's vitality. Our Acadian and Francophone community is, for the vast majority, rural. So this is a major success.
The challenge is to do it. At the end of my presentation, I talked about distances and support from governments. We often hear employees, politicians and federal government officials ask what the province is investing in this area. The Health Department was the first department to hire a person whose one and only responsibility is the provision of services in French. Other departments will imitate it.
With the little funding we have, we've managed to introduce health initiatives for the Francophone Acadians of Nova Scotia.
The persons responsible for providing services, 99.9% of whom are Anglophones, told us they would cooperate with us in developing projects. They also told us that they had been given permission to rethink the programs and that they were copying our models in order to implement them in the majority language communities.
With support, we can get there. We aren't just little guys and girls who are fiddling around with little projects. We're doing our best to promote the vitality of our communities. We want people to be able to live healthy lives in French until their dying day. We also want them, regardless of their employers, to be able to work in French in their communities, to be educated and have services in their language.
The challenge is to maintain infrastructures and programs that will make it possible to create the community that we want. You don't do that overnight.