I lived in New Brunswick for several years, so I'm quite familiar with New Brunswick. My father is from New Brunswick. He's a francophone Acadian from New Brunswick.
There have been several improvements, I will say. Just the recognition of New Brunswick as a bilingual province is great. We saw the World Acadian Congress this summer. I was there. It was quite an event. So there is some progress being made.
There are still quite a few gaps. Our beef, if I can use that term this morning, is that it has been 40 years. I don't know the statistics. I'm sure some of my colleagues would. How many of those complaints were filed by anglophones and how many by francophones?
When it was created, the Official Languages Act was meant to create equal status for English and French. Is equal status 99% of the time getting service in English and 75% of the time getting service in French? As I said, it's a law. When we decided that everybody needed to wear their seat belts, we didn't say that 75% of the time you need to wear it and 25% of the time you don't. The day after the law came in, I think we gave a one-month heads-up that it was coming in and we were giving warnings. But after that one month was up, that was it. If you got caught, you got fined.
That's what we're saying. Why did we not apply the same rigour to the Official Languages Act as we would to any other act in this country? As Canadian citizens, are we going to settle with the bare minimum--and sometimes not even the bare minimum--for 40 more years? Are we going to be back here in 10 years saying the same thing?
Canadian citizens are in favour of linguistic duality, at 77%, and this is the biggest opening we've ever seen. This is the time to make these changes. This is the time. I think that as a society we need to.
If I may talk about the Olympics, we've talked about the Olympics at length. I think the Olympics are great. What I'm hearing--me personally as a francophone citizen, not the FCFA--is that international communities are coming and we need to show them how we can greet them and how they can be made welcome. For 40 years I've lived in this country and we haven't made any effort at the Vancouver airport to provide me with services. So it's telling me that as a Canadian people we are valuing more the guy from France than we are me, the francophone who's been contributing all these years, the businesswoman who's been here all these years and paying income tax. That's the message we're getting.
For me, it's all a question of respect and equity, nothing more and nothing less. We don't want anything more than what's given to any other Canadian citizen in this country, but we don't want anything less either.