Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I thank all of our witnesses for being here this morning.
It is a great pleasure to meet you.
As my colleagues on the committee have said, we have been studying the Roadmap for Canada's Linguistic Duality for several months now. The program was implemented in 2008. The biggest change for the linguistic communities is that they get long-term funding. As you said, it is difficult for your organizations to function without that long-term support. That is why we started the roadmap in 2008.
Another aspect of the roadmap deals with inter-departmental coordination. That is perhaps not something that you can see. This coordination with federal government officials here appears to be in the background; but it also constitutes another change.
Thank you for being here. We are looking for some feedback from the groups that have benefited from this new approach to supporting linguistic communities.
I want to ask the Quebec Anglophone Heritage Network some questions. Because I don't have time to ask all of you questions, I want to do maybe a bit of a deeper dive.
I'll give an example of why I think the work you're doing is so important.
Recently I was talking to some parliamentarians from the Republic of Georgia. They're always in a linguistic struggle with a Russian minority, and they have a large Russian neighbour. They talked about the importance of maintaining their heritage in the republic. They gave the example that Russians will take over a 1,000-year-old Georgian Orthodox church and put a Russian onion dome on top and remove any traces of the Georgian language within the republic.
I am not saying that Canada is Georgia or Russia. But could you describe the importance of heritage, recognizing the centuries of linguistic reality in the province of Quebec?
Furthermore, it is the same story in the rest of Canada, in terms of the francophone heritage in other parts of the country.
What is the importance of what you do for young people? I am the father of young children. My children are 12 and 10. Could you describe some of the things you do and what they mean in terms of their outlook with respect to the language and with respect to the communities they live in and are neighbours with?