I think the federal government can help the minority communities in two or three areas.
First, health hasn't been developed at all. Authorities have really started to concern themselves with French-language services elsewhere than in our hospital only two or three years ago. In view of the fact that there has been very little investment in the past two years, the Conseil Communauté en santé has essentially developed three service delivery models for the rural communities.
First there are community access centres like the one in Notre-Dame-de-Lourdes that we were talking about earlier. Second, there is the telehealth program. We're installing equipment to connect the Francophone communities to the telehealth network for the first time. This has never been seen before back home. We were going to hook up small Anglophone villages near us, but we weren't reaching the Francophones.
With a little money from the projects of the FASSP, the primary health care adjustment fund, we could hook up eight Francophone communities in one year.
The third model is the mobile team's model, as Mr. Gagné mentioned earlier. These teams consist of four or five health professionals who travel from village to village to serve the communities in the rural regions.
Lastly, we'd like to develop other models, but there are start-up costs.
The second area, as Mr. Simard mentioned, is communications. I hope Mr. Boucher will mention it as well when he testifies because it's an area that's in serious trouble in our community. Pardon me, Sylviane, but with all due respect to La Liberté, I feel that Francophones don't have access to the communication services they need.
The third area is support—and I hesitate to say it—for Francophones asserting the rights that follow from provincial and federal statutes. Those statutes aren't always complied with, and, when they are implemented, people rely entirely on the interpretation the governments make of them. That's where we're in trouble. Had it not been for the Court Challenges Program, we probably wouldn't be here today.
Thank you very much for your question.