Good morning, everyone.
Thank you for the invitation to appear before you this morning.
I would definitely like to talk to you about the roadmap.
The Conseil économique et coopératif de la Saskatchewan, or CECS, is a member of the Réseau de développement économique et d'employabilité du Canada, RDÉE Canada, to which I will be referring. We benefited from the last roadmap, that of 2013-2018.
The RDÉE is established in all provinces and territories of Canada. The funding we receive enables us to assist francophone entrepreneurs in preparing business plans and market studies, for example, and to work with companies on business expansions, purchases and successions.
We also work closely with the official language minority communities in Saskatchewan, mainly in establishing community economic development projects.
You may wonder what community economic development is. Consider the example of Ponteix, an official language minority community that we helped to develop an emergency centre. That roughly $750,000 project made it possible to create three permanent and several part-time jobs in the community. The emergency centre provides ambulance, paramedic, and firefighting services.
In the official language minority communities, we use the francophonie as a value added. When we help a community, the community as a whole benefits from our services, both the majority and minority communities. The fact that francophones are in the community is a value added and promotes the economic development of those communities.
We believe that economic value is the basis of all other development. In other words, economic development is the main driver of everything that happens in culture and even education. If there were no jobs or viable and vibrant businesses in the communities, there would be no population and it would be unnecessary to have schools in our small communities where there is a francophone presence.
As you know, our economy has been quite strong for some years now, but a slowdown is currently under way. Like our neighbours in Alberta, we see the impact of that slowdown on employment and the economy in a community. The creation of a solid economic development base is central to a community's vitality.
We have also helped another minority community in the northwest part of the province, and that enabled it to establish a seniors home, which is also a three-level health centre. Six permanent jobs and three part-time positions were created as a result.
People often get the impression these jobs do not make a big impact. An outside consultant conducted a study on the impact of our investments in the official language communities. In a community of approximately 600 inhabitants, six permanent jobs and three part-time positions are equivalent to 800 jobs in a region such as Ottawa. What we do has a significant impact on the official language communities in rural or remote regions, as some people call them.
The funding we have received also helps Saskatchewan's official language community as a whole.
We are now able to find more efficient ways to manage the money we receive, spend, and so on. We are working to create an administrative services cooperative for Saskatchewan's entire francophone population and for the community's provincial and community organizations.
RDÉE Canada recently published a white paper entitled Prospérité économique des francophones et acadiens, or Economic prosperity of francophones and Acadians. Together with Quebec's official language minority community, we have worked to develop a Canadian economic development plan for the official language communities. I cannot provide you with a copy of the white paper for the moment since this is a video conference, but I can definitely send you one if you are interested or if our RDÉE Canada colleagues in Ottawa have not yet sent you one.
Our value added is increasingly apparent in the global economic context. A study the Conference Board of Canada conducted a few years ago clearly showed that the francophone community's contribution to global economic development constituted a value added. Despite that fact, the demographic weight of the OLMCs was a problem as those communities represented only 6% of the total population of Canada, a 3% decrease relative to 1971.
In 2011, the number of francophones in Saskatchewan increased for the first time in decades. However, their representation as a percentage of the population is still in decline. The rise in the number of francophones is obviously due to francophone immigration, which has mainly affected Saskatchewan's two major cities. It is still essential for us to maintain this demographic weight and to belong to the bilingual Canada we know.
Again on the subject of francophone immigrants—and I know we will be discussing this later—they represented only 2.4% in Saskatchewan, which is far from the 4.4% target established by the federal government a few years ago. For us, francophone immigration represents our community's long-term vitality. It is therefore essential to take all possible measures so that francophone immigrants and their families can come and settle here, help populate our schools, take part in our community's activities, and help us maintain our demographic weight within the community.
Early childhood is another component we are examining. We have enormous problems. Our inadequate infrastructure prevents us from offering early childhood day care services. Whether newcomers or not, the fact that people do not have access to these kinds of services in the official language of their choice—French in this instance—often means these children wind up in anglophone or other child care facilities. It is essential for us that special attention be paid to early childhood.
In the past, we have nevertheless benefited from tourism projects as a result of roadmap funding. The Prairies region and the four western provinces are working on various projects, and doing it together.