Good afternoon.
Thank you very much for giving us this opportunity to share with you our experience of life in French here. I hope this will be helpful to you. We have prepared an overview of who we are, what we do, what we're experiencing and how we deal with it. If this brings grist to the mill, that will be a good thing.
I would like to give you some historical background regarding the Comité francophone catholique Saint-Eugène-de-Mazenod. While some religious services in French have been offered since 1991, the Oblate fathers ultimately were the majority here. Most are Oblates who were in the North, and many of them were Francophone. One of the Oblate fathers from Quebec felt strongly about services for Francophones. So, starting in 1991, there were religious services once a week, as requested by certain families.
The Comité francophone catholique Saint-Eugène-de-Mazenod, however, was officially established in 1998. Its mandate is quite simple: it is to provide an active pastoral life to the Francophone catholic population of the Yukon.
In the early 1990s, as I was saying, the pastoral ministry was initially in the hands of an Oblate father who had been living in the Yukon for several decades and felt strongly about the need to support the Francophone cause. After that, other priests followed from the Dioceses of Chicoutimi, in Quebec, and Quebec City itself.
It's important to note here that, at the time, the Anglophone diocese was not interested in providing pastoral service in French. It was only through the determination, tenacity and resourcefulness of men, women and families that this service came into being and has continued to exist for some 20 years now. Anglophones have no choice but to accept us.
Without having the legal status of a parish—we do not have a parish, in fact—our Christian community is more than 200 strong, and the pastoral reality is the same. Our community is diverse in terms of age and origin: it goes from newborns to seniors, some as old as 97. It includes Francophone and Francophile single persons, couples and families who, in many cases as well, are from all the different provinces of Canada and from Europe.
We would initially gather in the schools for Sunday mass; since 1997, however, the Anglophone Sacred Heart parish has been providing us with accommodation and technical support, in the form of space for a secretariat in the church rectory and a weekly meeting place in the cathedral.
Originally supported financially by the Quebec organization Mission chez nous, which provides support to missions in Quebec's Far North, we now receive half of our annual funding from Catholic Missions in Canada, which has the same mandate for all of Canada's Far North. The other half of our budget comes from donations from our members or Francophone parishes and organizations in Quebec.
I would now like to talk about our areas of activity. Although it tends to be more concentrated in Whitehorse, our pastoral action extends all across the Yukon Territory, based on the needs of Francophones and their communities. I have just come back after a week in Dawson.
Our priority areas are liturgical services, faith education and sacramental initiation, fraternity and community life, care and spiritual support, visits to the elderly, the sick and families, as well as considerable emphasis on social justice and mutual assistance.
So, a priest and a technical assistant responsible for pastoral life encourage the development of activities and support the actions of dozens of volunteers, without whom pastoral services would not exist. Because this is a community need, people quickly understood that, if they wanted services, they would have to develop them themselves.
We were told that we could talk about some of the issues we are facing and make recommendations in that regard. We have two. This brief preamble will perhaps have allowed you to better understand our issues, based on which we have some recommendations to make with respect to the way of life of the Francophone minority in the Yukon.
The first one is this: what brings our Christian community together is not, first and foremost, language; rather, it is the desire to celebrate our faith in our language. One cannot help but observe that there is a natural equation between the language of the heart and the mother tongue.
The whole area of spirituality works that way. Many events in life—the birth of children, illness, mourning and death—are experienced most fully and most naturally in one's mother tongue. Visits to the elderly who are less able to cope on their own, and to the dying, are particularly eloquent examples of that. Many French-speaking people who have lived most of their lives in English, here or in other Canadian provinces, are comforted by the ability to once again be able to share their experiences, memories, concerns and hopes in their mother tongue.
It's as if the language engraved on the hard disk of their brain or their soul suddenly began to prevail, for some, over their memory loss, for others, over their growing fragility, and for others still, living in even greater isolation, over their disconnectedness from reality. I discovered that here, because I was part of a majority. That was something new for me.
One day, a Francophone nurse working in a centre told us about a lady who was dying all alone and who was French-speaking. It was the first time I saw that kind of rapport. That lady had lived her entire life in English, but she died in French. The last thing she was able to say in French was: Hail Mary. That was when I realized the significance of this.
On another occasion, a young woman who spoke only English remembered that her mother used to hum songs in French. She was from Manitoba. She had been suffering from Alzheimer's disease for several years. Her daughter believed that her mother didn't have much longer to live. She told me that she hoped someone would come and pray with her in French. That was a very happy coincidence for me, because I did not speak English at the time. The lady in question was the same age as my mother. As soon as I began reciting prayers the lady knew, she opened her eyes and started moving her lips. She lived for a year that way. She was senile in English, but she prayed in French. There is a very strong connection there that people tend to talk about a lot more now in homes for the elderly. When people know that no one speaks French, they try to establish that kind of rapport.
Providing spiritual support to the dying is another area where the reestablishment of spiritual contact is often connected to a lifetime of experiences that are deeply embedded in these individuals. They have the sense of finding a certain facility again when they make contact with their mother tongue, the language of their roots, the first language that penetrated their being when they were still in the womb. The pastoral service is also available to quite an extensive community network for the sick and their families.
There is also poverty, the housing crisis, domestic violence, depression and other problems, which are no different for Anglophones than they are for Francophones. And yet these realities are that much more bitterly felt when there is, in addition, an inability to make one's self understood in one's language.
The following recommendation is quite simple, but I think it's always a good idea to mention it. I suggest that, with respect to health and social services—particularly services for families, seniors and the sick—a complete range of services be available in French in accordance with the Act. There is a need, not only to provide services in French, but also to promote respect and dignity of the human person.
If the Comité francophone catholique has managed to provide pastoral service in French for the last 20 years, it is more as a result of active resistance than any recognition by the Anglophone majority. We are not waiting to be given the right to exist, but we do exist, humbly and actively, and seek to impose our presence in all its authenticity and colour and its originality, within our diocese and church, but also the entire Yukon community.
That active resistance facilitates the necessary mobilisation of all our members in the pursuit and attainment of our objectives. It also reminds us that nothing can be taken for granted. While our most ardent desire is to continue to experience our faith in French, it is also important to recognize that this service will remain dynamic only as long as the people wishing to receive it remain involved. Indeed, it is that involvement that leaves its mark and allows the Anglophone majority to open up to that duality, as if by contamination or by attraction. It is important to state that this is also the lot of all Francophone organizations in the Yukon.
So, our recommendation, in support of a dynamic minority which too often grows weary at having to defend the legitimate right to speak French in a country with two official languages, is that both the federal and territorial governments show some political will by clearly recognizing that linguistic duality and enforcing it in concrete terms. To that end, the federal government must improve its monitoring mechanisms to ensure respect for the Official Languages Act and effective promotion of linguistic duality.
Its involvement would encourage the territorial government and all other civil or religious institutions to admit the French fact as a building block in building the Yukon.
In closing, I would say that, based on what we are experiencing in Yukon, linguistic duality receives greater recognition when it is experienced as a companion to the other culture, rather than as something that sits in opposition to it. The CFC would like to see the achievements of the minority acknowledged as a source of cultural enrichment for the entire community. That companionship is part of the history of the Yukon. Why not ensure that this historic recognition remains an example. That is our hope.
Thank you.