Thank you very much, Mr. Godin.
I'm from northwestern New Brunswick—a beautiful province—but I've been living in Vancouver for a long time. I'd like to talk to you a little, if you will, about the success of the program in the context of things that the union is doing at SDE, the Société de développement économique de la Colombie-Britannique, rather than talk about la Francophonie, which I believe will be the subject addressed by the federation.
So SDE is responsible for creating an economic area for the Francophone community in British Columbia. Our purpose is to try to help Francophones start up businesses in British Columbia. For that purpose, we engage in strategic planning to help Francophones start out in business in British Columbia. Here's a brochure on this matter.
We're also working with our Anglophone counterparts who are doing more or less the same thing. These are the SADCs, the equivalent of the Community Futures Development Corporations. This is a promotion that we're doing jointly to show that we're working and that there's no overlap: Anglophones and Francophones are working together to ensure that the Francophone community is well served everywhere.
We also have a project designed to attract tourists from France and Quebec to visit our beautiful province. I hope you've had a chance to see the city and that you've seen it's worth the trouble; we also boast about our beautiful city. We send out 50,000 brochures a year in which we talk about the Francophone products that can be found here in British Columbia. We're doing the same thing in the four western provinces. We often work together to obtain economies of scale, and we've sent 660,000 brochures like this to Quebec City in recent years to ensure that Quebeckers know we exist and to invite them to come and see us.
The economic impact for a single province, for an investment of $400,000, is more than $25 million. So that's an impact that's really worth the trouble. That's a conservative assessment. Generally, when they travel, Quebeckers stay here for 21 days. So I did my evaluation on the basis of 14-day stays. All that to say that your investment is really worth it because the impact of spending in the order of $400,000 has been $25 million for a single province. That's the case for Alberta; British Columbia gets even more tourists.
We're also working with the federal government, naturally, to ensure that an economic area is represented in British Columbia, but we're also working very closely with the province. Together we're doing promotion to encourage investment in British Columbia. We're doing advertising, called Vivre à l'étranger, in countries like France. In it, we were saying that Vancouver is a beautiful city to travel to, of course, but that it's also a beautiful city to invest in, a beautiful city for doing business in British Columbia.
Every dollar spent in New York corresponds to 69¢ spent in Vancouver. So it's less expensive than travelling to the United States. We therefore encourage people to come to British Columbia, where it costs a lot less to do business. We're working very closely with the province to encourage people to invest here. As you know, we have a labour shortage. So we're also working very closely with the province to encourage immigrants to settle in British Columbia.
Thus, in broad terms, our mandate is to create an economic area for the Francophone community. We're doing a lot of things to raise the Francophone community's visibility and to ensure that there are a lot of jobs and good businesses in British Columbia.
I'd like to thank you for your support because it really makes a difference. There really is a positive impact, and we'd like that to continue.
Thank you.