Official Languages Committee on Feb. 24th, 2016

[Steven Blaney, Conservative, Bellechasse—Les Etchemins—Lévis, QC]

Mr. Chair, you talked earlier about the importance of new platforms and new media and the role they are now playing in communications. We are seeing an explosion, whether we are talking about the Internet, Facebook, television channels, private or otherwise. The impact they are having is a topic that might interest the committee.

It might be interesting to ask the commissioner whether the change in the media environment is having repercussions on linguistic duality and whether that is an opportunity or a threat. Let me use my kids as examples. They no longer look at local newspapers. Instead they go onto their platforms, their iPads. It would be interesting to see how the linguistic space is faring in that universe.

[The Chair, Liberal, Denis Paradis]

Great, let us add social media and linguistic duality to our list of priorities.

We're going to suspend the meeting for 10 minutes or so.

[The Chair, Liberal, Denis Paradis]

We are now resuming the meeting.

Allow me to welcome Mr. Hubert Lussier, Assistant Deputy Minister, Citizenship and Heritage, and Mr. Jean-Pierre Gauthier, Director General, Official Languages Branch.

Gentlemen, welcome to this meeting of the Standing Committee on Official Languages.

For the information of our colleagues, I would first like to remind you of the way in which we proceed. You will make a presentation of 10 minutes or so. It will be followed by comments from our colleagues.

In the first round, the order will be as follows: Conservatives, six minutes; Liberals, six minutes; NDP, six minutes; then the Liberals, six minutes again.

In the second round, the Liberals will have six minutes; Conservatives, six minutes; Liberals, six minutes again; Conservatives, five minutes; and the NDP, three minutes.

That is about 50 minutes in total. If we add the 10 minutes for the initial presentation, that will give us the full hour.

If members have other questions and the hour we have today is not enough, we may well invite you back to another meeting.

Gentlemen, the floor is yours.

[Hubert Lussier, Assistant Deputy Minister, Citizenship and Heritage, Department of Canadian Heritage]

Thank you, Mr. Paradis.

I am going to let my colleague Mr. Gauthier make a presentation on a rather complex issue. We understand that there may well be a lot of questions.

Therefore, it will be a brief presentation. We understand the question is mainly to address the road map for official languages, and your curiosity will be aimed mainly at results, so Jean-Pierre will speak for less than 10 minutes—that's the challenge he's been told to respect—and then we will be free for questions.

[Jean-Pierre Gauthier, Director General, Official Languages Branch, Department of Canadian Heritage]

I would also like to extend greetings to you and to thank the committee for giving us the opportunity to come and present the roadmap to you.

I suggest that I review the roadmap quickly. Mr. Lussier and I want to give you as much time as possible for questions. So we will give you the basics, and our answers to your questions will likely be your opportunity to get into the details in which you are most interested.

You have received the PowerPoint presentation. I will go through it very quickly. I am just going to guide you through the pages that seem to be the most important. If I may, I will start directly on page 5. I will jump over the preamble, it is there for your future reference.

I am going to talk to you about the origins of the roadmap and its content. Then I will talk quickly about the accountability measures that the roadmap has in place. I will come back to that later.

To quickly review the origin of the road map, on page 5 you have statements that we found in government budgets that gave us a bit of direction in terms of what it was intended to do.

The first time we had a statement was in 2012, which was about the same time that we were contemplating the next strategy, so it was very timely for us. We launched into consultations essentially in the summer of 2012. They took the form of a series of round tables that went around the country. We basically invited people from the community, as well as, if I can say so, the majority group, to try to get a sense of what communities thought as a whole with respect to official languages.

There were also a number of consultation elements that we paid close attention to. One was a study from this committee at the same time, which we followed very carefully. We took considerable time to review the committee's report. We also followed the sectorial consultations done by the other departments very carefully. Many of them have consultation forums with the communities, and we wanted to take stock of that insight as well.

We also organized a symposium on official languages research at about the same time, where we held discussions with our provincial colleagues.

That, broadly speaking, is what happened in 2011-2012. We gathered a lot of information. That is pretty much the exercise that we are diving back into now. We are looking for those contacts and that information in order to design a future roadmap.

Let me quickly introduce the roadmap for Canada's official languages 2013-2018.

The roadmap is built on certain major parameters. It is funded in the amount of $1.1 billion over five years. Let me remind you that the plan ends on March 31, 2018, the end of the fifth year. The strategy has 28 components or initiatives implemented by 14 federal institutions, including Canadian Heritage, which has responsibility for many of those initiatives. The 14 institutions include several other departments and crown corporations.

I would like to point out that, although the roadmap represents the key elements of what is being done in official languages, it's not all that is being done. Other departments are also active in official languages issues to different degrees and in different ways. The roadmap is also a way of presenting the key elements of what is being done in official languages and of opening windows onto the various initiatives that already exist.

The roadmap has three pillars: education, immigration and support to communities. Page 10 of our presentation shows the education pillar and the list of initiatives in education, which clearly tend to focus on youth.

The key is the assistance that the federal government provides to provinces and territories so that they can provide minority language education at primary and secondary levels. But we also assist them in post-secondary education with specific projects. Assistance is also given to provinces and territories so that they can offer second-language learning, meaning French outside Quebec and English in Quebec. That assistance comes to about $240 million per year, quite a significant amount. It comes under the education pillar.

The next pillar is support to communities. This pillar includes specific initiatives designed to support minority communities. A number of federal institutions participate in these initiatives, in particular the Department of Justice, the Department of Employment and Social Development, and the Department of Health.

I will leave it up to you to tell me the things that you would like more details about through your questions.

The final pillar is immigration. This pillar is essentially the responsibility of the Department of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship. It has two major initiatives. One initiative deals with the reception and integration of French-speaking immigrants. We all know that it is a priority for francophone communities that immigrants settle proportionately in French across the country.

There is also training for immigrants in order to be sure that they have a solid knowledge of at least one of our two official languages. This initiative is more a matter of promoting both official languages rather than an initiative targeted to minority communities.

Page 15 shows all the pillars in one diagram. At the top of the diagram, the box describes the strategic objectives to which we are committed. I will leave it up to you to read them. If you have questions on the objectives, we can come back to them.

The last point that I wanted to cover was how we account for whatever gets done on the road map. I would submit two key sources to you. They are readily available and present the results from all of the various initiatives in the presentation.

The first one is annex 5, on page 13. It's one of the supplementary information tables that accompanies the 2013-2014 departmental performance report. It lists all of the initiatives one after the other. It provides you with the amount of funding that was forecast to be spent. It presents the amount that was actually spent. Where there's a big gap between the two, we ask that the department provide an explanation of the gap.

The last column of that table is about results, meaning exactly what has been done and what has been achieved with those investments over the year. It provides an interesting amount of information in terms of what that investment has done in a given year. If you look at all of the years successively, you're going to get an overall picture of what the road map has done or is contributing to.

The second source that we use to provide information about what the road map is doing or has done is our annual report on official languages, which is also readily available. If you'd like copies, I'd be happy to send copies to committee members. The last edition of the report was tabled, I believe, in July. It covers the year 2013-2014. We are working on the next edition, 2014-2015. The annual report includes road map achievements as well.

In it, we've blended what Canadian Heritage does in terms of its own programs with what the other departments of the road map do, so as to provide an overall view of what has been done with respect to official languages across government. A fair amount of information in that report actually pertains to what the road map has funded and supported.

Between these two sources, you have a certain amount of information about specific examples of achievements, and occasionally overall statistics in annex 5 of the departmental performance report. These are key components for us to try to communicate what's going on with the road map.

[Hubert Lussier]

I'll just add one thing, with your permission, Mr. Paradis, which is that the departmental performance report that Jean-Pierre is talking about is, of course, the Canadian Heritage departmental performance report, because we are the department that coordinates the road map. It is available on our website. Unfortunately, these are not published in paper format.

[The Chair, Liberal, Denis Paradis]

Thank you very much for your presentation.

We will start our first round with Mr. Généreux.

You have six minutes.

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

Good afternoon, gentlemen. Thank you for being here today.

As you know, I was a member of this committee for a year and a half, from 2009 to 2011, while my colleagues here—

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

Excuse me, Mr. Chair. I really want to hear Mr. Généreux's questions when it is his turn, but, if I am not mistaken, I was supposed to speak first.

[The Chair, Liberal, Denis Paradis]

I have to tell you what I am told, that first there are six minutes for the Conservatives, then six minutes for the Liberals, then six minutes for the NDP, then we finish with six minutes for the Liberals.

[Steven Blaney, Conservative, Bellechasse—Les Etchemins—Lévis, QC]

There are some advantages to being in the opposition.

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

I am sorry, Mr. Samson.

[The Chair, Liberal, Denis Paradis]

So, Mr. Samson, you will have the floor during the Liberals' six minutes.

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

Okay, and I hope my colleague, if he is as generous as his name, will use only four minutes.

[The Chair, Liberal, Denis Paradis]

Over to you, Mr. Généreux.

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

That is not going to happen. I am certainly not going to have my time stolen from me. You can take some time away from Mr. Samson, Mr. Chair.

As you know, I was a member of this committee from 2009 to 2011. Mr. Blaney was the chair of the committee at that time. So the roadmap was put in place by our government. The initiative was very well received all across Canada. I have now been away for the last four years.

In a way, we wanted to meet with you specifically to put everybody back into context. We have a number of new members around the table, in fact, and we wanted to find out the status of the initiatives that have been put into place in the roadmap. I will not dare to ask you to give us a specific number of where we are on a scale of 1 to 10. But are you able to give us an overview that is quick and to the point, yet still quite complete? For the roadmap itself and for all the initiatives, how many have been completed? Are there areas of the roadmap that are less advanced than others? Do you have an answer for me?

[Hubert Lussier]

To answer your question objectively, I would say that the funding available was spent effectively. We can say that because we have two full years to refer to, plus a third that will be over in a few weeks.

Jean-Pierre will give you the exact number. In the second year, I believe that 95% of the anticipated expenses were spent on the objectives as set out in the roadmap's original documents.

Some initiatives took time to get going in some departments, because they took more time to launch them than was anticipated at the start. We did what we call a carry-forward, which involves pushing funds from one year into the following year.

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

I want to make sure I understand. You are saying that funds unspent in one year are carried forward to the following year. They are not returned to Treasury Board but they are kept to be spent in the next year.

[Hubert Lussier]

Exactly.

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

Okay.

[Hubert Lussier]

Jean-Pierre, can you describe that for us?

[Jean-Pierre Gauthier]

Yes.

In the first year of the roadmap, we spent 93% of the funds budgeted. Last year, we spent 95%. At the beginning of the summer, we compile the figures for the current year just ending. Most of the initiatives are progressing as planned. The programs that were supposed to issue funds, did so, as the expense figures show. In that respect, we are quite satisfied with the overall way the roadmap is going.

There were a few unique cases, representing some quite modest amounts in the overall picture of the roadmap. For example, we took a little more time to launch the social development partnerships program, which requires a different administrative approach. My colleagues in Employment and Social Development Canada had to start by establishing the basis of the program. They assure us that the amounts identified in the roadmap will be spent in the three years that remain. This is $4 million out of $1.1 billion.

There were adjustments at the outset. Federal institutions knew that, in the first year, Treasury Board authorization had to be obtained, as well as all the authorizations needed to launch and publicize the programs, to gather funding applications, study them and issue contribution agreements. The institutions gave the recipients time to do what they wanted to do with the funds. A number of institutions chose to show a minimal amount in the first year, zero in some cases, and, with the permission of the Department of Finance, to carry it forward to the four following years.

That is what we did with one of our programs, the community cultural action fund. We knew that we would not be able to get the funds out in the first year. So, rather than losing the money in the big financial picture, which is the rule, we got ahead of the game as early as the autumn by asking to get the money back and spend it in years two, three and four. In that way, we were sure that our investment over the five years would be the same.

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

Okay.

You are telling us that 95% of somewhere around $200 million were spent in the first year, the second year and probably the third year.

What system do you have in place that allows you to analyze the results? Everyone here can spend money quite easily, I figure; that is not really a problem. But it is something else to make sure that the money spent produced the anticipated results.

Do we have documents to prove it? In our work, we will meet a number of people who will have had access to that money and can explain to us what they did with it. That is not a problem.

My question is for the department. Have you taken steps to make sure that the money really was spent and the objectives were achieved?

[The Chair, Liberal, Denis Paradis]

Thank you, Mr. Généreux.

Go ahead, Mr. Lussier.

[Hubert Lussier]

The document that will give you most information about that is the one that Jean-Pierre was talking about just now. It is the report on results, published as an appendix to the report from the Department of Canadian Heritage. You will see that, given the particular nature of their activities, some departments give very concrete explanations, for example the number of health care professionals trained as a result of these investments. Health Canada has an activity in the education component and trains health care professionals, such as physicians, orderlies or nurses.

Since I feel that is what you were trying to find out, I will tell you that other results will be a little less concrete. They are more about the number of partnerships established with organizations charged with implementing the programs, for example. That may perhaps leave you wanting more in terms of definitive results, and we are still waiting for additional information about them.