Certainly. It's difficult sometimes. We face this question often with culture—right?—and with cultural organizations where, for example, if we have.... We put in place the fifth pillar of our road map, which is language and culture. People ask, “How do you know if you received benefits from that?” Well, we say, we set aside a pot of money of $14 million and organizations applied for money. They qualified for the money. They spent the money. A festival happened. Kids went to it. Was it effective? Time will tell. There's no matrix to tell you whether or not it was effective: a child having a good experience, right...?
On the other hand, there are other programs where you can have more concrete results. For example, we talk about how French immersion.... And by the way, that's a very large success story. Mr. Dion pooh-poohed it, but give me a break: when there's a 10% increase in enrolment in French immersion education in this country, that's a fantastic result.
Liberals never saw that. We've done that, and we're very proud of that, but we didn't do it by bullying provinces. We worked with provinces. We provided the funding. We make the argument consistently and proudly on the importance of both of Canada's official languages.
That's a real result: a 10% increase in French immersion enrolment by young Canadians. When you learn a language at a young age, it sticks with you for life, and you'll learn a second language and you'll learn a third language. You'll become proud of this country and proud of its heritage and its bilingual past, present, and future. That's a great thing. That's a great success story that I'm very proud of.
When you put in these investments, sometimes you can measure concrete results and success stories. There are the thousands of nurses and doctors across this country who, in an effort to service communities where a sizable portion of the population is French-speaking, go and learn French. For example, somebody phones in a panic and says,
“Yes, my young child is having problems with his legs. He needs help. Can you help me?”
If somebody on the other end of the phone says, “I'm sorry, but I can't help you”, they need that support. In a panicked moment, people need to be able to communicate in the official language of their choice. Doctors and nurses now have a program that's available to them whereby they can learn French, so that when somebody picks up the phone in a panic and says,
“Yes, my child is having some kind of crisis. There is something abnormal with his legs. This is an emergency, can you help me?”
they can get an answer in French. It's helpful. Hundreds and indeed thousands of nurses and doctors have been trained in this country because of this investment. That's a real benefit. We're going to continue doing this and we're going to continue to have results. It's going to continue to work.
I think when people see the next road map, when they realize what we have done and will continue to do, they will realize that official languages in this country are doing incredibly well, and it's going to be an ongoing battle to make sure that we have these services.