Our governments must show leadership. No one seemed to notice, but the Official Languages Innovation Program was cut. Fourteen million dollars had been provided for federal councils to promote leadership pursuant to part IV, that deals with public communication and service delivery, and part VII, which deals with promoting French and English, and the Official Languages Act.
The Saskatchewan Regional Federal Council is the only council that still has a structure for coordinating official languages. People took up a collection to maintain this structure because they believe in it. However, we do not have the leadership and the resources that we need to implement the Action Plan for Official Languages and to ensure that the governments work together on this. It is really unfortunate.
We have often heard that the action plan was not cut. There was a sum of $14 million and last year, about $2 million were spent. We think that about $7 million or $8 million remain that have not been spent. We must take a leadership role for the future of our early childhood programs or other programs.
The cement for building this country is in the francophone communities in every region of Canada. If we are not allowed to act, we will continue a never-ending debate between nations, without really knowing where we are going. I think that this is where the government must take a leadership role.