Franco Médias 2010 was an important project for many reasons. As a government, we're always looking for projects and key investments at a grassroots level. I'm not just talking about major projects, but also, from time to time, more modest projects which may help young people to learn and to speak the official languages in regions of Canada where it is a little more difficult to find employment or job opportunities. It may be a way of enabling storytelling about mainly anglophone communities and of speaking about these anglophone communities in the francophone media which are available countrywide electronically. That's important.
One of the things you always look for, I think, with new media, as a government with regard to official languages, is you try to find these opportunities. I used to say all the time that it was a sad thing, I remember, when I first got involved in politics, that in rallies, for example, in Quebec, you would see young people so enthusiastic about Quebec leaving Canada. They were talking about leaving a country they had never seen, never read about, never heard about, they've never had it reported on in their media because it wasn't available. Because when you have a tragedy, such as a shooting in Prince George, or if you have a great success, like an Olympic Games, or if you have a great moment, all Canadians should know about that. All Canadians should know about our own shared experiences, our tragedies, our triumphs, our successes, our failures, our struggles. We should all know about this.
But when there's that barrier of language between one region of the country and another, it doesn't help the future of this country if we don't get to have those shared experiences, good and bad. So when you have this project, Franco Médias 2010, the idea of this again is to take a few young kids who want to become reporters, give them a little bit of money, and let them talk about the Olympic Games. Not just the sporting aspects of the games but the adjacent events associated with the games—the volunteers, the infrastructure things, successes that were put in place, the things that matter on the ground that often don't get talked about—and have them be told in French to Canadians from around the country, so that it's not just the filter of the official broadcasters of CTV, that you can get around that through different projects like this so we can have these shared experiences understood in both official languages.
Take the horrible floods in the province of Quebec about 10 years ago; it doesn't serve this country if people in Port Moody, where I'm from, can't witness that and experience that and understand it in their own language. We need to understand the tragedies and successes in other parts of the country, and when the barrier is language, the role of government, in our view, is to make investments into magazines, into media, into projects like this for kids so that we can break down those barriers, so that we can have these shared experiences and bind ourselves together as a country.