Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you also for welcoming me today.
I'd like to first of all thank all of you for the work that you do every day for our community. It's very much appreciated.
When it comes to the sense of frustration, I think part of it is that I think generally speaking English-speaking Quebec feels that it's badly understood in the rest of the country—that if you're not part of the community, whether you're a part of the majority community in Quebec or part of the community in the rest of Canada, you don't understand necessarily all of the issues that have confronted the community, how much the community has changed, and how many myths are still out there about English-speaking Quebec.
For example, as I understand it, the mother tongue English-speaking population of Quebec has fallen from more than a million in 1971 to approximately 650,000 today. The number of students in the schools, as Ms. Maccarone outlined, has gone from 171,000 in 1972 to about 95,000 today.
While we have a wonderful nucleus of health care institutions around Montreal that the community built over centuries, we have issues if you're English-speaking in the Gaspé or English-speaking in the Magdalen Islands or English-speaking in most parts of Quebec, because you don't necessarily have access to a doctor close by or even a school close by, and you can be bused for many hours to go to school.
If a community has become much more bilingual and tried to change and evolve over time, it's still confronting a lot of issues with respect to retaining young people and with respect to caring for isolated seniors, and I think people don't necessarily understand that. They feel that when English-speaking Quebec comes to the table and asks for equitable funding, it sort of looks like, well, you're gâté. You're spoiled.
That's why I really appreciate your intervention today. What I'd like to hear from all of you, again, in terms of the priorities for the next action plan, is how we bring more English-speaking people to Quebec who could then enter our English schools. As we know, immigrants can't go to English schools in Quebec even if they're from the English-speaking community, so how do we attract other English-speaking Canadians to Quebec? How do we keep our young people in the province and how can the federal government help you all do that? Maybe we could hear from each of you on that.