Good morning.
My testimony will be more subjective than objective, in that it will be based on my own personal experience.
In 1994, I negotiated the first agreement for the Northwest Territories, where I lived for 10 years. It was a pilot project that Canadian Heritage had instituted, at the time, without Treasury Board's knowledge—as we learned later—and which lasted until 2001. The federation is the umbrella organization comprising all the francophone community groups in the N.W.T., and it managed the agreement. In fact, the project was self-managed. The federation received the cheque and was responsible for all expenditures and for allocating funds based on the needs of the community and of each group. It worked very well.
In 2001, Canadian Heritage changed its approach to results-based management, and all of a sudden, we went from being partners to clients and got caught up in an unbelievable administrative muddle. For example, proposals had to be signed by the chair of the board in blue ink, the chair's signature had to be authenticated by a witness and a copy of the board of directors' resolution had to mandate the chair to sign the proposal. Things have gotten a little better since then.
The worst thing about this change in approach was, undoubtedly, the way the agreements' objectives had to match those of the Government of Canada. The government supports its francophone communities on the proviso that they share the government's objectives. And that leads to a whole lot of problems. For example, communities have to adapt their overall development plan and make it fall in line with the government's interests, which does not always mean that the communities are getting their real needs met.
Perhaps we could emulate Quebec. In Quebec, there are 48,000 not-for-profit organizations including 8,000 community action organizations. Of these 8,000 organizations, 5,000 get financial support from the Quebec government totalling about $670 million annually, and it is divided into three forms of funding: service agreements, projects, and overall mission support.
The great thing about the overall mission support is that it makes up 60% of the $670 million. And those funds are allocated to 4,000 autonomous community action groups. They are autonomous because they are not in a dependent relationship with the government. The groups are not funded on the basis of what they do, but on the basis of who they are.
In Nunavut, we claim that the francophone communities are Canada. Clearly, the Canadian government manages their growth. It is said that there is a lot of vitality in our francophone communities, but their vitality waxes and wanes with the injection of funding, or lack thereof. If funding should dry up all of a sudden, our schools, our associations, our newspapers, and so on and so forth, would close.
Right now, we have the sense that we are just getting by. And that's not a very good impression to have. Francophone groups are still coming to terms with the overwhelming red tape, a bureaucracy which, in my opinion, is overzealous. These groups still have to tweak their overall development plans to fit the government's interests. Every year, pages and pages of reports have to be blacked out. As someone said this morning, that puts a strain on our precious human resources that are there to respond to real needs, so this is being done at the expense of these communities' development and vitality, and that of Canada, because in our opinion, their needs are one and the same.
In conclusion, I would be pleased to elaborate during the question and answer period.