Official Languages Committee on Oct. 18th, 2016

[Sylviane Lanthier]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

As you know, we were initially supposed to appear before you in September on the matter of francophone immigration. We requested a delay because we were preparing to hold the very first meeting of the Table nationale de concertation communautaire en immigration francophone, and we wanted to be able to give you news after the fact.

The FCFA is very proud of this issue table, which took a year and a half to design. We pulled out all the stops to come up with a structure that is inclusive and representative of the situation of the communities. In addition to the provincial and territorial organizations representing the francophone communities, this organization includes representatives of all sectors concerned by francophone immigration, including economic development, health, and the colleges and universities.

Following the issue table's first meeting earlier in October, we consulted with Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, and departmental representatives gauged the extent of our communities' knowledge of and experience with francophone immigration.

There have been some positive policy developments in recent months, such as the coming into force, on June 1^st, of the Mobilité francophone component, which facilitates and accelerates the process for employers recruiting francophone applicants from abroad for certain occupational categories.

The Ministerial Conference on the Canadian Francophonie also committed to holding a francophone immigration forum, which we now know will take place in Moncton, New Brunswick, on March 31 next.

Lastly, the provincial and territorial governments agreed over the summer on a target of 5% for immigration to the francophone minority communities.

We sense a renewed political will on francophone immigration. However, that will must also result in specific, targeted measures that enable us to carry out our major francophone immigration project. I say project because, for the FCFA, immigration transcends the merely utilitarian aspect of increasing our demographic weight. The strong communities we want to build will also be inclusive, open, and modern communities made richer by their many francophone accents. We want to give, but also to receive, as may be seen from the efforts our communities made to take in Syrian refugees last winter.

The plan for society that is francophone immigration is generating a lot of energy in our communities. Considerable effort has been made over the past 15 years to develop promotional and recruitment structures and initiatives and intake and integration services by and for the francophone communities that are adapted to their situations and those of the immigrants who settle there.

There is no shortage of success stories. Our youth experience a diversified francophonie in our schools, and francophone immigrants increasingly occupy key positions in our community organizations and institutions, in which they therefore participate. National francophone immigration week, which the FCFA created in 2013 is growing every year in all regions of the country.

And yet conditions are not always conducive to our achieving successful francophone immigration, as I said earlier.

First, let us talk about international promotion. The organizations representing the communities do not have the resources to take part in events or international tours such as Destination Canada to present our communities as welcome centres that have much to offer potential immigrants. We also have no support in the area of promotional tools, despite increasing demand for such tools from Canadian embassies in Paris, Berlin, and elsewhere.

Despite the fact that the Mobilité francophone component has come into force, we are still far short of our 4.4% recruitment target and have fallen further behind in every successive year we have failed to meet that target. Express entry, which has been in force since January 1^st, 2015, still does not have a francophone lens. Since 2012, the FCFA and Réseaux en immigration francophone have been asking the department for that lens, which would help us achieve real francophone immigration results.

As currently designed, the system does not favour francophone applicants. We recently provided the department with recommendations on this point which I will present to you in my conclusion.

If the federal government seriously wants to meet its francophone immigration targets, it will put a renewed recruitment strategy in place, more specifically by expanding immigration pools and source countries and by ensuring that the main recruitment systems, such as express entry, actually promote the selection of French-speaking immigrants.

The third link in the immigration continuum is intake, settlement, and integration. In this connection, services such as Accueil francophone in Manitoba and Immigration francophone in Nova Scotia shine by the quality of their work with newcomers and the way they are established in the community.

However, the services simply are not available where they are required, and the support they enjoy varies from place to place. A map created by the FCFA last spring shows that there are still deficiencies in a number of locations, whether it be employment services, language training, or establishing connections with the host community. However, results on the ground show that francophone immigrants are far more integrated when they are served by francophone organizations.

Other challenges include the ineligibility for settlement services of workers recruited through Mobilité francophone, whereas the purpose of that program is clearly to retain those workers over the long term and to help them transition to permanent residency.

Furthermore, only one French-language settlement service is currently accredited for refugee intake. And yet our communities have a long tradition of supporting refugees. For example, various community stakeholders—schools, parishes, and associations—have worked over the past 20 years to take in, settle, and integrate refugees from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Burundi, and Rwanda. These efforts are most often made with little in the way of government resources or support.

I have spoken at length about the challenges and, in general, have suggested solutions. I would like to close with a few more specific recommendations, and I hope the committee will adopt them as its own.

First, with respect to promotion, we would like the government, in consultation with the communities, to develop a policy of systematic promotion of the francophone minority communities. That policy would include a budget for the purpose of involving the organizations representing the communities in events such as Destination Canada and a marketing plan adapted to various target publics such as economic immigrants and international students.

As regards recruitment, first of all we would like the Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship to include a francophone immigration target when reporting to Parliament every year on immigration levels for the upcoming year. We would also like the department to include a francophone lens in the express entry program, whether it be in addition to the comprehensive ranking system of a question on the first official language spoken or an increase in the number of points awarded for knowledge of the second official language. We would also like the department to make the visa-issuing process more flexible for international students to facilitate their progress from temporary to permanent residency, for example. Lastly, we would like the government to solve the problem of unfair access to language proficiency tests, which are more costly in French and unavailable in places such as Newfoundland and Labrador and Windsor, Ontario.

As for intake, settlement, and integration, we would like the Canadian government to support our communities in offering certain settlement services to temporary workers, to support the provision of a full range of services developed by and for the communities in all regions of the country, and, lastly, to build the capacity of our communities to provide intake and settlement services to refugees in French.

The FCFA is very proud to be a prime partner of the federal government in francophone immigration. Our remarks here today are intended to be constructive, and our intention is to be part of the solution. After all, diversified francophone communities made richer by the contribution of immigration are good for us, and they are good for Canada as a whole.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Denis Paradis]

Thank you very much, Mrs. Lanthier.

We will begin the round of questions and comments with Mr. Généreux

[Bernard Généreux, Conservative, Montmagny—L'Islet—Kamouraska—Rivière-du-Loup, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Good morning, Mrs. Lanthier.

[Sylviane Lanthier]

Good morning.

[Bernard Généreux, Conservative, Montmagny—L'Islet—Kamouraska—Rivière-du-Loup, QC]

Earlier you said there was no money in the roadmap for promotion. You just said as much about immigration.

How much do you think would be needed to do a good job of promoting Canada's linguistic duality and the minority communities not just to immigrants, but also within Canada?

[Sylviane Lanthier]

I do not have a specific and precise answer for you as to an amount. However, I know that funding under the first roadmap was allocated to facilitate the communities' involvement in Destination Canada, for example. I also know that the documents the FCFA has prepared in the past, including maps showing where the francophone communities are located and providing a snapshot of them, were extremely appreciated by the embassies, which also helped distribute them. The embassies constantly ask us to make those kinds of maps again. I do not think it necessarily costs a fortune. However, what I understand is that doing it would really have a significant impact for us.

[Bernard Généreux, Conservative, Montmagny—L'Islet—Kamouraska—Rivière-du-Loup, QC]

You are talking about very advanced tools, not necessarily about large-scale tools such as new websites or social media strategies. As someone said earlier, this is 2016, and people rely a lot on social media in making life choices and choosing where they want to live.

Is the FCFA on social media? The FCFA represents all associations of minority communities across Canada. Do you think all those communities are well served by social media?

[Sylviane Lanthier]

You know, the FCFA website has a francophone immigration section providing detailed information on the services offered in each community and a snapshot of our communities, in addition to other information. We constantly invite people to go to the website and get informed. However, I believe you are aware of what is called discoverability on the web. In other words, so much content is offered on the web that sometimes it is difficult to find the information you are looking for.

Although social media and the web are really important tools, during national francophone week, we also conduct video conferences with the Canadian embassy during which we talk to potential immigrants around the world. We are already doing that kind of thing.

I myself have taken part in Destination Canada, and I can tell you that nothing works better than direct contact with people who are prepared to come here and to whom we can explain the difference between living in Vancouver and living in Saint-Boniface. Nothing works better than that.

We are often told that people who come here do not understand the country they are going to live in. For example, I worked with a young girl from France who told me that, when she arrived in Winnipeg, she thought she was landing in a bilingual country. She thought that all Canadians spoke both languages. Well, no, that is not the case. The country is officially bilingual, which means that the federal government offers services in French. How do you explain to an immigrant what the offer of service in French means? You have to explain to them that it does not apply in places where francophones represent less than 5% of the population or clientele. That is how people are entitled to services in French in one place but not in another. For example, you can obtain services in French at one airport but not at another, aboard one Air Canada flight but not another. No one can understand that.

So when we talk to people before they arrive in the country, we really have to adopt a human approach. That is very important.

[Bernard Généreux, Conservative, Montmagny—L'Islet—Kamouraska—Rivière-du-Loup, QC]

You mentioned Destination Canada. Are you telling us we would do well to increase the number of Destination Canada events?

[Sylviane Lanthier]

Destination Canada is currently held in three cities. I think we would do well to include francophone immigration in other spaces where the federal government, that is to say Canada, is likely to go and recruit people who will come and live here.

There are other countries where people speak French. The Association des collèges et universités de la francophonie canadienne, the ACUFC, has just conducted a mission to Brazil to go and speak French to young Brazilians so they can come and study in Canada. There are francophones all across Canada, but around the world as well. Many people are interested in discovering our country through the French language. That is an idea that we forget when it comes to attracting people to our country.

[Bernard Généreux, Conservative, Montmagny—L'Islet—Kamouraska—Rivière-du-Loup, QC]

I want to go back to a part of the roadmap that Mr. Arseneault talked about earlier and that inevitably concerns immigration. It involves money.

Suppose, in your craziest dreams, that the FCFA is given $150 million tomorrow morning and that you are asked to allocate that money among all the associations in each of the provinces. What would you do differently from what the federal government is doing now?

[Sylviane Lanthier]

What would we do differently?

[Bernard Généreux, Conservative, Montmagny—L'Islet—Kamouraska—Rivière-du-Loup, QC]

That is a killer question.

[Sylviane Lanthier]

Yes, a killer question.

I think the most important thing we would have to do would be to determine the most fundamental effects we want to achieve with the resources we have and the money we invest. We would have to determine the best ways to spend the money to achieve our goals.

That is an interesting question, but it is so hypothetical and broad that it is difficult to answer it fully.

[Bernard Généreux, Conservative, Montmagny—L'Islet—Kamouraska—Rivière-du-Loup, QC]

That is all right. It is the craziest dreams that can change things.

[Sylviane Lanthier]

What interests me most is really the impact we can have. Developing communities and community organizations: that is probably the best way to have a long-term impact. You need to have living communities for francophone communities to develop.

[Bernard Généreux, Conservative, Montmagny—L'Islet—Kamouraska—Rivière-du-Loup, QC]

As you may remember, I sat on the same committee in 2009. Unless I am mistaken, I do not remember us discussing early childhood as part of the roadmap when we were conducting analyses.

I understand that a tree is a living, evolving thing. You drew that comparison earlier. However, why are we talking more about early childhood today than we did five years ago? Perhaps we should have decided to deal with early childhood 25 or 30 years ago, since the roots of francophone culture lie in the education of young children.

[The Chair, Liberal, Denis Paradis]

Thank you, Mr. Généreux.

[Bernard Généreux, Conservative, Montmagny—L'Islet—Kamouraska—Rivière-du-Loup, QC]

I did not get an answer to my question.

[The Chair, Liberal, Denis Paradis]

We will consider it a comment. Perhaps Mrs. Lanthier can answer it later during another speaker's turn.

Now I must turn the floor over to Mr. Samson.

[Darrell Samson, Liberal, Sackville—Preston—Chezzetcook, NS]

That is good; I like his question. I would like to hear Mrs. Lanthier's answer, but first I want to give my own answer. I just want her to know the cards I am holding.

In fact, it is because it is not included in section 23 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. That section does not concern the education of children five to 18 years of age. Consequently, no money is allocated to early childhood or postsecondary education. The discussion is therefore limited to those fields, which explains why we did not discuss early childhood.

I do not know whether you want to add to that, Mrs. Lanthier. I will give you 30 seconds to do so because I have five good questions for you too.

[Sylviane Lanthier]

In fact, I have a 25-year-old son and a 22-year-old daughter, and I can guarantee you we talked about early childhood when they were young. We had already identified that need.

[Darrell Samson, Liberal, Sackville—Preston—Chezzetcook, NS]

Yes, we have always discussed it.

As a former director general, I can tell you that investing in francophone early childhood is probably the most important thing we can do. It supports our French-language minority schools. It enables the parents and children of exogamous families to speak French, and there are more of them now as a result of today's mobility.

In fact, 80% of students enrolled in a four-year early childhood program do not speak French when they enter the program. However, they enter French school after completing the program. It is essential to prepare them well, to begin their learning in French school, and to establish a relationship among parents, the community, and the school. There can be no doubt about that.

I questioned former Liberal minister Ken Dryden several years ago when the government had promised $5 billion over five years for early childhood. At the time, I said exactly what you noted earlier, that, if children go to an English-language day care, they will very probably go to English-language school.

So we have to be on the leading edge. We have to ensure that, when investments are made in infrastructure or other fields, minority francophones are given more consideration before the projects in question are approved. I will not say too much about that because you alluded to it earlier

I would briefly like to hear your comments on the new program that has replaced francophone significant benefit.

[Sylviane Lanthier]

The introduction of the Mobilité francophone program was excellent news, but it cannot solve all the problems and does not meet all the needs.

It is excellent news and an excellent start, but more has to be done.

[Darrell Samson, Liberal, Sackville—Preston—Chezzetcook, NS]

That is very good.

A little earlier you referred to the 5% target.