Good morning. I am the President of the Assemblée de la francophonie de l'Ontario, an organization that has existed only since the month of June. We held our first annual general meeting in June. I do not know whether a brief was submitted to you. If not, it will certainly be sent on later.
Very briefly, the Assemblée truly reflects the drive of French-speaking Ontario. Our vision for Ontario is: a French-speaking Ontario united in its diversity, that shows solidarity in its actions and that is collectively committed to its well-being.
The AFO is truly inclusive. In terms of diversity, for example, we have representatives of ethnocultural racial minorities, and we have sectoral representatives. In all, 14 sectors are represented on our organization's board of directors. From the geographic standpoint, five of the province's regions are represented. To begin with the geography of Ontario, we have francophones in Thunder Bay, Orillia, Kingston, Toronto, Ottawa, etc. This means that for francophones to get together, people have to travel, sometimes more than 1,000 kilometres, to come and see us in Ottawa to attend meetings. For the francophonie, the geography of Ontario is rather vast.
There is also a feeling of isolation within the francophone community. It is often said that people are isolated in rural communities, but the francophone community in Toronto is also isolated. There may be 50,000 francophones in a city, but when there are 2 million in the province as a whole, it is not necessarily easy to be in touch with one another.
Interests vary from one community to another. In the small town of Hearst—where I was born, and my parents still live—the population is 98% francophone. My mother has lived there for 80 years and does not speak English at all. Elsewhere, in southern Ontario, the situation is completely different.
For the first time this year, we did some strategic planning and established two development thrusts, because we did not want to spread ourselves too thin. We said to ourselves that as a new organization, it was important for us to make sure that we did not try to do too much at the same time. The two objectives we set were organizational capacity—because we are a new organization, and must make sure that we can do the work properly—and strengthening our political actions. We need to make sure that what we do is based on facts.
We have a few priorities: collaboration and coordination among sectors, regions and racial minorities; communications; increasing the number of services in French. From the political standpoint, with respect to increasing French-language services, we turn mainly towards the province, and to the French Language Services Act, etc.
Another priority is visibility and recognition from governments: the work of the provincial association in recent years did not have much of an impact because the group was in the process of restructuring. Now that things are in place, we want to make sure that we are much more visible and in a position to increase financial resources and government support.
In terms of being dynamic, the meetings that were held over the past few months showed that there was solid representation from the francophone population.
I will list the 14 sectors I was just mentioning: seniors and retired people; special needs; communications; community development; education—there is the whole aménagement linguistique issue that affects several levels, even the colleges—; youth—which is very much engaged: we have a very strong youth organization in Ontario; it is perhaps the strongest organization of its kind in Canada—; the municipal sector and urban planning; the arts, culture and heritage; cultural centres and community development; cooperatives; the economy; women; justice, and lastly, health. All of these sectors are very dynamic and very well represented on our board. There are many different activities just about everywhere in the province within these groups.
As for ethnocultural racial minorities, as I was saying, there are four sitting on our association. It is essential, and it is included in our by-laws and regulations: we need to have ethnocultural racial minorities within our organization. There are other members who are members of racial minorities, but not elected as representatives of the racial minorities. They are simply elected as people from the community. Thus, we have five regional representatives.
The challenge to us as an organization, and what we want to do with government assistance and cooperation, is not to make demands on Parliament Hill, but to work with government to move our issues forward.
The important issues for us are: increased funding for the francophone community—it is almost impossible to do the work we need to do as an organization; we have over 1,000 in Ontario—increase in services and having the federal government consult the community.
Thank you, Mr. Lauzon.