Thank you very much, Ms. Lambropoulos.
As I mentioned, in two major cases brought before the Supreme Court of Canada, I represented the anglophone minority, which was facing important challenges similar to those that francophone minorities were facing elsewhere in the country. In these cases, the Attorney General of Quebec was the opposing party. He told me that they liked when I defended francophone minorities outside Quebec, but were less enamoured with the idea of me representing Quebec's anglophone minority. I told him that everything the Government of Quebec was doing to the anglophone minority gave all the other governments permission to do the same thing to francophone minorities.
The most vulnerable in all this are young people. There are varying degrees of commitment by members of a linguistic minority. On one end there are those who would rather die than give up their language and culture. That is the case of Mr. Samson and others. On the other end, there are those who, in response to being asked in a store “I don't speak French. Why do you speak French to me?”, when they were speaking French, will stop making the effort, get on board, and that is where it ends. We are taking care of those on that end of the spectrum. We make all our decisions with a view to protecting the most vulnerable and those who are just about ready to give up.
That is why it is so important to fight decisions like the ones to cancel the university project and cut an essential part of the Commissioner's mandate. All our decisions seek to protect the most vulnerable. We are fighting for them. We are taking this to court for them. Unfortunately, most of these people are young and do not fully appreciate what it will take to preserve their language and culture.
The good thing is that most of these young people learned about the Montfort Hospital case in school. That case is part of the curriculum for all linguistic minorities in Canada. They study the Montfort case and why it was brought before the courts, what the courts ruled and why it is important to keep up the fight. They are the ones we are fighting for.
I will tell you why this decision to end the university project is so hard to accept. A university like that would allow young people, who are more vulnerable, to do their university studies in French after completing their secondary school program. Of course there are excellent francophone colleges, but there would have also been a francophone university option.