Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I am pleased to have an opportunity to ask our guests a few questions and to make a few comments myself.
You say that francophone communities are slowly dying out, and that concerns me in the long term, because that is the direction in which we are heading. The reason the francophones outside Quebec have made progress is thanks to the work of their organizations. I'm thinking of organizations such as the Société des Acadiens et Acadiennes du Nouveau-Brunswick, the SAANB, the Société nationale de l'Acadie in New Brunswick, and ACFO in Ontario. These organizations worked with their communities. I cannot imagine a community moving forward and succeeding when its members get up in the morning, go to work and come home at the end of the day feeling they are isolated. I do not see how we could survive like that. Although Ms. Barbot says that we should not call ourselves a minority, that is the fact of the matter.
We need only look at the scandals that have happened here in Ottawa. The Auditor General said the programs themselves were not bad, but that they were poorly managed. So we should not be punishing everyone. We should not be punishing those who were helped by these programs by cancelling all of them; we should be managing them better. This opens the door to the government, which now says that there are some programs in place but that it cannot manage them. So it is abolishing them and using the money to pay down the debt. In 15 years, the net debt will be eliminated—whether it is net debt or whatever, I really don't care—and we are going to pay the price of this. There will be a terrible price to pay. It is like trying to pay off a mortgage in two years but deciding not to buy any groceries. That is what the government is doing.
Organizations are suffering from all the cuts in programs such as the Court Challenges Program and various literacy programs. The current government does not seem to believe that organizations of this type should exist. It is following the American model and is giving individuals some money and telling them to look after themselves.
I would like to hear your comments on this question. Should the government not be reviewing this entire matter? In its report, should the Standing Committee on Official Languages be questioning the decisions made by the government and telling it that it has taken the wrong tack by taking away from our communities the organizations that they need to get people working together and to set up programs? In Sudbury, we heard it clearly: the Collège Boréal said that without ACFO, it simply would not exist. The same is true of the francophone health network in Ontario: without ACFO and certain other organizations, it would not exist. No one will do this work for us. In your presentation, you said clearly that you needed money to do this work. It cannot be done with volunteer labour.
I would now like to hear Mr. Pierre Bélanger's comments.