Thank you, Mr. Chair and committee members.
I would first like to thank you for inviting the Alliance des femmes de la francophonie canadienne to come and give its remarks on the next official languages action plan.
The acronym is AFFC. It is long.
The AFFC is the voice of 1.3 million francophone and Acadian women living in minority communities, and the representative for 12 organizations of francophone and Acadian women across the country.
With its consultation process last winter, the AFFC feels very informed about the needs of francophone women in these communities. It defends the rights of Canadian francophone women to live and develop fully in French.
We are going to combine our two interventions. We will speak about the roadmap while addressing immigration. I hope we won't go over 10 minutes.
We would like to focus our remarks on three specific aspects: accessibility to French day care services; health care services provided in French, geared to women's needs; and the capacity building of organizations, by and for francophone women.
Let's start with day care services. I'm sure you know already that francophone or exogamous families, and mainly immigrants, resign themselves to putting their children in an anglophone day care service when they are unable to place them in a francophone day care. This contributes to the loss of French, despite themselves.
This is a distressing situation. It is harmful for the family, the child and the community. As the report of the Commissioner of Official Languages indicates, language and culture is traditionally passed on within families through the mother. There's a reason why we call our first language our “mother tongue”.
Providing francophone day care services helps to share this responsibility of protecting the language and culture of francophones but, also, to ensure the vitality of a community for which this language and culture are central.
However, this social infrastructure allows much more. It enables the confident participation of women in the labour market, thereby giving them the right to fully contribute to the development of their regions and to grow professionally.
In fact, it is very often the woman who decides to stay home to take care of the children in French, when the service is not available. In connection with that, I would like to show how this affects immigrant women.
To provide some context, a francophone woman who immigrates here may be a professional but, most often and mainly in the case of refugee families, she has never worked and her literacy level is very low.
She has many children, too. This woman, like all the others, is asked to facilitate the family's integration process and balance. This integration usually involves English classes, a job in an environment that, most of the time, is in English. There is also a whole system of guidance, mainly in English, in the francophone minority community. This is possible for her only if she can send her children to school or day care.
If the need for day care services in French is the same for all francophone women, the issue becomes critical for immigrant women for two main reasons: first, French isn't necessarily their mother tongue and, second, the need for integration involves either classes or a job. This makes the situation even more difficult. If a woman is required to spend her day in English and her child isn't placed in a French day care, how much quality time do you think this family will give to French?
That's the first thing. Yet, these immigrants come here as francophones, and most francophone immigrants who live here—the vast majority, I don't have recent statistics; they are from 2010—over 60% of them arrive from Africa. So these people have other mother tongues.
If there isn't a school structure or day care that allows children to begin their development in French, how many parents are willing to pay for a francization course or themselves francize their children, whereas they had a foundation that was supposed to be French?
I will speak about a second aspect: the active offer. With regard to health care services in French, we would like to focus on the need for services for vulnerable women, especially those who face violence.
Do you know how many transition houses in French there are in minority communities? One, and it's in Toronto. It only offers first-stage housing. All the other centres that take in women at the second and third stages, and all the crisis housing aside from the one in Toronto, operate in English. If a francophone woman is in crisis, or has an immediate need because of violence, she may have to use an interpreter, and it all depends on when the interpreter is available. That's the reality for women in minority communities. As for the population of transition houses—I'll take the case of Manitoba, which I have more statistics for—over 80% of the occupants are immigrant women.
Once again, that means that there is a lot of awareness and work to be done to be able to respond adequately to this reality.
It is well known that these services are lacking, mainly because no policy requires anglophone institutions to provide services in French. They are tied to the limited capacities of organizations that hire a bilingual employee here and there who is available at specific times. Often, you need to go through an organization in Quebec to obtain interpretation services. Again, this depends on whether the need is expressed during regular business hours. Outside those hours, there is no telephone consultation service for francophones in minority situations who are in crisis.
So what does a francophone immigrant woman who lives in British Columbia do, when she fears for her safety or the safety of her children and who needs help when the employee is on vacation or isn't available? This is the reality for women in minority situations. We now believe that by applying the comparative gender analysis in the next action plan on official languages, you will realize the importance of the two points I have just mentioned on achieving substantive equality in Canada, with a consideration of the reality of immigrant women.
We also think it is necessary to promote a social structure that would recognize the reality of the needs of all social groups of the new francophonie, which is, in fact, multicultural. These organizations think about these social infrastructures, think about the impact on women and provide inclusive programming that reflects the diversity of multicultural francophonie in minority communities, that is to say outside Quebec.
So, to complete this analysis of the situation, I will speak about our last point, which is capacity building of organizations created by and for francophone women in minority communities. This reinforcement begins with proper core funding and funding that takes a long-term perspective. The change isn't immediate. The change should be gradual and should support these organizations in the long-term because that work that is done is different and has different variables that require time to better understand in order to structure the appropriate response.
Our resources are mostly eaten up by funding research work, while we would do better to use them to provide direct, high-quality services. If that was done, we would all benefit from the new roadmap.
In terms of immigration and this reinforcement, it is important to encourage more solidarity initiatives in which immigrant women could meet, talk about their reality, and find solutions that allow them to see how they could meet their needs and integrate further into the reality of the francophone minority. We don't want to lose francophone women who settle in our regions because the social structure isn't adapted to their reality.
Thank you, and I can now take your questions.