I attended the annual banquet of the Conseil économique du Nouveau-Brunswick, which is a francophone council. There were 600 entrepreneurs at that banquet, which is quite good for New Brunswick. It's an entrepreneurial environment. The business that won the award for business of the year invented a new machine in the forest industry. That conference was also attended by Mr. Deveau, president of Les Algues acadiennes, a Nova Scotia business that does business with 80 countries.
We Atlantic francophones are sending out our message, but we must not forget the 200 million francophones around the world and the 50 countries where French is spoken. Let's think of the Sommet de la Francophonie in Montreux, where I met the prime minister. All that's important.
I'm thinking of the francophone fibre which is increasingly in evidence, particularly in New Brunswick, where all those call centres were established in the 1990s. That has almost made Moncton the current Canadian capital of call centres. That was Mr. McKenna's idea at the time. Increasing numbers of anglophone economic analysts from the Moncton Times & Transcript understand that bilingualism is an investment, that it pays to be bilingual. That's the message that is increasingly circulating and we are proud of that.