Your report—and I say this with all due respect for your qualifications to carry out such a mandate—adds nothing new to the three reports that we have published since our tour in the fall of 2006. Earlier, in response to my Liberal and NDP colleagues, you mentioned that there was some overlap. In fact, it is a duplication of work. The only thing new is the issue of funding.
At the time when I worked for the Fédération de la jeunesse canadienne française, a study by Roger Bernard indicated that it would take several billions of dollars to achieve equality between French and English in Canada, that is, if we wanted to come back to the time when assimilation had less of a negative impact or had not yet become this appalling process by which many French-speakers have lost their language and culture.
In your report, you proposed a $1 billion amount. I read that $802 million, or $810 million, had been invested over the past five years. You suggest the $1 billion dollar figure. How will that money be spent, and based on what criteria? How are the funds to be channelled? You say that that is a bare minimum. Perhaps the sky is the limit, but how did you come to that number? You have lived in the Francophonie, in Acadia, where every day... I was born in Ontario and I lived many years in Saskatchewan. I was also an activist in the Franco-Saskatchewanian community. There is so much work to be done.
Why put forward the $1 billion dollar amount? Why not more? How did you settle on that amount?
