Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
On behalf of the board of directors of the Fédération des francophones de la Colombie-Britannique, I would like to offer my very sincere thanks to the members of the standing committee for the enlightened, determined and proactive leadership they have shown to date in their proceedings during this 2nd Session of the 39th Parliament. The entire community is monitoring your proceedings, and we assure our organizations are well aware of your efforts and of the enormous job you have done and of the subjects you have covered. We appreciate that, and I wanted to acknowledge it on behalf of our community. It goes straight to the heart.
Our federation is a coalition of 35 institutions and organizations, both francophone and francophile—I want to tell you this—that are dedicated to increasing the offer of services and activities in French.
In British Columbia, we are going through a particularly accelerated development cycle. Our francophone community is undergoing explosive change. Our community infrastructure, however, is still very young, as you must know. We have been in catch-up mode for the past 10 to 15 years. Our institutions are young, our progress is recent and, in some instances, uncertain.
At the same time, we are experiencing significant demographic changes with the arrival of numerous interprovincial migrants and immigrants who have specific needs.
Our population is increasing, as are the expectations and needs of our community: nearly 300,000 British Columbians report that they have a good knowledge of French. Three hundred thousand people is a lot, and the number is constantly increasing. A new francophone identity is being born in British Columbia, a francophone identity of the Pacific, which is very interesting and different from what is found elsewhere in the country: not better, but definitely different.
The Fédération des francophones de la Colombie-Britannique plays a special role in this infrastructure. Our federation has a mandate and responsibility to negotiate, sign, manage and evaluate the present collaboration agreement with the Department of Canadian Heritage, which was signed in 2005. The community voted to give us the same mandate for the previous two Canada-Community Agreements.
We are about to complete an evaluation of the agreement and resulting mechanisms. Consequently, today I am able to present some findings and conclusions validated not only by our federation, but by all our regions, sectors and target groups as well.
In general, everyone agrees on the importance of signing agreements that formalize the partnership between the federal government and the francophone community and guide their actions toward strategic issues and priority actions.
For our francophone community, these agreements constitute a public commitment to act and be responsible for achieving results that are deemed significant for the French-speaking citizens of our province.
The community sector agrees that there has been a re-expansion of the francophone community in British Columbia since the first Canada-community agreement was signed in 1994. All our main sectors—education and training, arts and culture, economic development, health and immigration, to name only a few—have experienced accelerated development.
The community has managed to diversify its partners. The federal departments and agencies subject to section 41 of the Official Languages Act are now investing more in our community every year than Canadian Heritage. In 2006-2007, those departments invested nearly $5 million. Canadian Heritage has invested approximately $2.6 million a year in our community.
The community has also benefited from a strengthening of its ties with provincial government departments through the federal government's signing of the first Canada-British Columbia Agreement on the Promotion of Official Languages in 2001. A francophone affairs program was established at the province's Intergovernmental Relations Secretariat. An elected representative was made responsible for francophone affairs. The second agreement, for 2006-2009, was signed and is about to expire. The renewal of that agreement is of capital importance for us.
Those are the positive aspects.
However, the community has identified many deficiencies in the last collaboration agreement that we think must be corrected. We must have a Canada-community agreement, not merely an agreement that contains no multi-year financial commitment. The annual budget granted by Canadian Heritage, which now fluctuates between $2.6 million and $3 million a year, is inadequate. Taking inflation into account, that budget has not increased since 1999.
The Bank of Canada website shows the amount of funding granted by Canadian Heritage for francophone affairs in 1999. The current amount is lower than that. And obviously the community has vastly evolved since that time.
The administrative processes are too complicated and application processing too slow. My colleague from Newfoundland and Labrador told us about interest charges. In 2005-2006, our association paid $60,000 in interest, which represents approximately 12% of the annual project budget for British Columbia. That's a waste of public funds.
These factors limit our ability to plan for the medium and long terms. They also result in the exhaustion of our staff and considerable uncertainty about our future as francophones and as builders in the heart of the Pacific francophone community.
Our civil society is exhausted. We are unable to pay our staff well. On Monday, I received the findings of a study on the working conditions of our francophone community staff. They are overwhelming. The average salary of managers in our network is $44,000 a year. And yet 96% of employees have a postsecondary education, and 36% have done postgraduate work. The turnover rate in our francophone community is 62% over two years. Try to plan for the medium and long terms when you constantly have to start over. Sixty-two per cent of employees work overtime on a regular basis. A large percentage of our organization's employees work on a volunteer basis. A number of leaders lend money to their association and use their personal credit cards and lines of credit to enable activities to continue, whether it's in the area of training or services offered to citizens.
For some time now, Canadian Heritage has systematically violated our agreement and our cooperation mechanisms, which were established jointly with that department. Funding is granted, often to our surprise, without it being consistent with community priorities. Those funds managed by the Ottawa office of Canadian Heritage do not comply with our project evaluation mechanisms. Those investments do not have the structural effects that the funding of Canadian Heritage and community priorities under the present agreement would have.
Accountability is still based far too much on activities rather than results. Reports must focus on the achievement of medium and long-term results. We need to focus more on the strategic effects, transformation and impact of our actions on citizens, not just evaluate how many citizens have taken part in a given activity.
Our agreement provides for a joint evaluation. As there appeared to be little haste or interest on the department's part in proceeding with that evaluation, we had to hire an independent evaluation firm to do it. We have therefore begun the evaluation because it was important for us to be accountable and to see whether we had met our commitments. We hope Canadian Heritage will do the same.
In our community, there are two solutions. First, there is an interest in greater regional independence. The government should enable the regions to innovate and adapt their intervention model to their situation and to the needs of their population. In that way, the regional offices and the community can work together and develop innovative ways to serve citizens.
Lastly, there is a lot of talk about grants. We are becoming service providers. We believe that the federal government should create an investment fund in each province and territory to promote the capitalization of economic projects that will enable the francophone community to be a credible economic partner at the municipal and regional levels.
We must go beyond grants and provide the communities with the financial means to take charge of themselves, to invest in projects and to contribute to the economic development of their municipalities, regions and provinces. That will enable us to have more influence and impact on citizens and to ensure our continued existence.
I'll stop here. Thank you for your attention.