Mr. Chair, distinguished members of Parliament, on behalf of the Fédération des parents francophones de Colombie-Britannique, thank you for coming to meet us to study the issues involved in implementing the Action Plan for Official Languages, 2018-2023: Investing in Our Future. It is a real pleasure for me to be here today in my very new role as acting president.
The federation is a key player in developing French-language education in the province. We contribute to community development in British Columbia in multiple ways.
Implementing the action plan directly affects all our areas of interest. First of all, we consider that, overall, the action plan reflects the cross-Canada consultations on official languages held by Canadian Heritage in 2016. We are particularly pleased with Canadian Heritage's supplementary budget envelope, the goal of which is to increase the core funding for community organizations. Starting this year, this has already meant a 20% increase in program funding for all the community organizations in our province. We look forward to learning how Canadian Heritage will be distributing the rest of the program funding from the second year to the fifth year of the action plan.
We hope that these additional funds will be distributed in a way that will lessen the funding disparities among organizations. We also hope that it will tackle troubling or emerging situations, including the issue of language transfer in our very young. In British Columbia, four out of five francophone children will be assimilated before kindergarten. This is of extreme concern for the parents we represent.
The action plan allocates additional investments in a sector that is particularly dear to our hearts. This is early childhood, where the need is great.
Although we are delighted with the $20 million in additional funding allocated both to professional education and training for early childhood educators and to help entrepreneurs, we still find it curious that the federal government has determined, with no prior notice and no consultation, that 33% of the funding will go to entrepreneurship and 66% to training. In a setting where the goal is to improve services for and by communities, and where needs and circumstances vary greatly from one province or territory to another, why not leave it up to the communities to decide which initiatives the funds should be used for, rather than setting limits or percentages on the strategies to be undertaken? The question has to be asked.
In British Columbia, for example, we clearly have to build community capacity first, after which we will be able to create new day care spaces. That is the conclusion we came to in the study we published last February entitled “Les centres de garde francophones pour la petite enfance en Colombie-Britannique”. This does not fit at all well with the funding allocated very specifically to entrepreneurship and training.
We believe that it is essential that the criteria and solutions proposed in the new early childhood funding framework be flexible and tailored to the particular needs of the communities.
The investment of $10 million over five years to the Public Health Agency of Canada to improve its health promotion program for young children is good news, in our view. The recent consultation with francophone communities allowed us to communicate to the agency our concern with certain aims of the program, and especially with the following points.
First of all, the action plan states that “the Agency will work with key stakeholders to ensure projects respond to the needs of the communities”. In many minority francophone communities in Canada, services in French are delivered by a single organization, which often makes the development of local partnerships impossible. The agency must therefore avoid imposing criteria and service delivery models that may suit the majority, but that do not correspond in any way to the reality of francophones in minority situations.
Second, we insisted that the agency model itself on the social innovation and social financing initiative undertaken by the Department of Employment and Social Development. We believe that the middle-of-the road approach, focused on services designed by and for francophones, lends itself more to flexible initiatives that meet the needs of francophone minority communities. The approach offers a sense of community synergy that, in the long term, leads to the implementation of permanent strategies.
We are delighted that the federal government plans to spend more than $95 million on community spaces in the next five years and that early childhood services are eligible for this infrastructure funding program.
However, many questions remain unanswered. Will early childhood programming be tied solely to school infrastructure projects? Will funding new projects for community day care services be allowed? Will the funding program be flexible enough to provide parents with services in their vicinity?
We believe that the infrastructure program must be able to be sufficiently flexible to provide parents with a range of services that are tailored to their needs and their geographical reality.
Although the current government seems to be listening to official language communities, the fact remains that the impermanent nature of the federal structure in its support for education in the minority language and for early childhood services in French, and the lack of concrete obligations in those areas, is keeping minority francophone communities in a perpetual state of uncertainty.
The Fédération des parents francophones de Colombie-Britannique therefore asks you to recommend that the government modernize the Official Language Act to guarantee specific and long-lasting protections in these areas.
Mr. Chair, ladies and gentlemen of the committee, thank you for listening to me. I will be happy to answer your questions.