Mr. Chair, ladies and gentlemen of the committee, my name is Cyrilda Poirier. I am President of the Fédération des francophones de Terre-Neuve et du Labrador, or FFTNL. Beside me is our director general, Gaël Corbineau.
First, we want to thank you for your invitation to appear, thereby giving our community the opportunity to express its views on the roadmap.
Since 1973, the FFTNL has been working for the advancement, development and recognition of the francophone and Acadian communities in our province. Today, the federation has six members, three of which represent the principal French-speaking regions of the province, and three other provincial organizations working in early childhood and youth development, and in economic development.
With a presence dating back more than 500 years, our communities today are mostly found in three regions, separated from each other by distances from 800 kiilometres to 2,100 kiilometres. You can guess, ladies and gentlemen of the committee, that, for us, geographical distance is a major handicap.
According to the 2011 census, our community represents 0.6% of the provincial population. In addition, about 25,000 people in the province are bilingual.
Mr. Chair, you asked us here to describe the positive aspects and the challenges associated with the roadmaps of 2008-13 and 2013-18.
With no shadow of a doubt, we can state the following. The interdepartmental approach that the successive roadmaps have made possible has without doubt assisted our development in all our principal areas by emphasizing the responsibilities of all federal departments in the development of our communities, and doing so with quantifiable commitments.
Of course, the roadmaps address many community sectors; given the limited time we have this morning, I will not have time to list them in detail.
Let us start with the positive aspects of the recent years. I will specifically mention the significant improvements in health care in French and in francophone immigration.
In health, investments in recent years have made a major contribution to the development of this sector to the benefit of our communities. Specifically, maintaining funding for the French-language Health Services Networks does not just allow health service activities for, and delivery directly to, the members of our communities. It also greatly enhances our ability to network and maintain relationships with provincial authorities and institutions with expertise in this area. This allows us to make our case with them and move forward.
I will not spend too much time now on the importance of francophone immigration for our communities, because that is on the agenda a little later this morning. However, I will say that the roadmaps have allowed the establishment of permanent francophone immigration networks. These finally allow us to work with less worry and a medium-term vision. Nevertheless, we have also faced challenges.
Without any doubt, the main challenge in these last 10 years was the initial launch of the 2013-18 roadmap. Many sectors had to wait for a long time—for too long a time—for the federal departments involved to establish their programs according to their responsibilities.
I have just talked about health. Health Canada took more than a year to implement its programs. That adversely affected many health networks across Canada, a good number of which had to let staff go, thereby losing the operational capacity and expertise that had been hard-won over the years.
In our province, the health network is a file that the FFTNL handles internally. We dearly wanted not to lose the only employee working in the area. We therefore had to compensate financially for the structural deficit that these unacceptable delays caused. Of course, that had to be done at the expense of our organization’s other files.
But things get worse. I will specifically single out Service Canada and Employment and Social Development Canada. That department has just allocated social development funds, in 2016, three years after the roadmap began, for seniors, youth, parents and women’s groups. The roadmap only lasts for five years, and it is simply unacceptable for the government to fail to allocate those funds until three years have gone by.
That does not make it easy to have a medium- or long-term vision; it puts a whole aspect of our community development at risk.
The behaviour gets even worse. Once again, Employment and Social Development Canada unfortunately gets the black mark. To this day, we still do not know where the funding for adult education and essential skills went. The department issued a call for proposals two or three years ago, but we have had no news since.
In the Atlantic provinces, where 42% of the population has problems with literacy, we find it difficult to accept the explanation that this kind of investment no longer has any use. Because of it, our organization has lost precious support from the Réseau pour le développement de l'alphabétisme et des compétences, often known by its acronym RESDAC. The network, whose mission is to mobilize its partners around strategies designed to improve literacy and skill levels among francophone adults, no longer has the means to help us today as it was able to in the past.
A province like ours has no organization dedicated to that area. So there is a lack of expertise that deprives us of precious support. The contradiction is that the funds are identified in the roadmap. But where have they gone? Ladies and gentlemen of the committee, the department will be harming our communities if it does not change its approach.
Let us now talk about the future, and the particularly pressing needs that we see for the period from 2018 to 2023. It is impossible for me not to repeat what I said a moment ago about the major needs for literacy and essential skills. Ignoring such a large proportion of Canadians would simply be going counter to the values on which our society was founded. I also want to point out the virtual lack of Justice Canada investment in our province. You are certainly all aware that a judge from Newfoundland and Labrador was recently appointed to the Supreme Court of Canada. For us, it was a time to recognize that justice in French does not exist.
We are in dire need of the means to provide legal aid in French to our citizens, but also the means to identify and encourage French-speaking lawyers. To us, it seems urgent for Justice Canada to draw up an action plan so that the provinces and territories, still deprived of everything in this area, can quickly respond to the needs of their francophone communities.
I will also mention the lack of core funding for our national association in this area, the Fédération des associations de juristes d'expression française de common law inc., or FAJEF. Although a strong national organization is indispensable for us in our provinces, the federation receives anemic financing that allows its office staff to work only one day a week. I hope you will agree, ladies and gentlemen, that this is a highly irregular situation that cannot be allowed to continue.
Investments in community infrastructures are without doubt a topic that will occupy a lot of our attention in the coming years in Newfoundland and Labrador. Since 2015, we have been in a long period of identifying the needs. The main one is for early childhood and community activity centres. In many cases, they could be combined with schools, and therefore with the provincial government. In both traditional and emerging communities, our needs are great.
Yes indeed, ladies and gentlemen, we have emerging communities; they are proof of the dynamism of our communities and the result of the efforts in the last 40 years to promote the country's bilingualism, and francophone and Acadian cultural identity. However, now is not the time to abandon those citizens, who also have needs and rights. So that leads to the very problematic status quo, in effect since 2004, of our budgets from the province for the core funding of our organizations.
For more than 12 years now, inflation has done its work and mathematically reduced the operational capacities of our community organizations. A number of them have very few opportunities to diversify their income; today, they are struggling to keep their staff, without even the means to pay for one full-time position. So we are losing our vital lifeblood on which the vitality of our communities depends, especially in rural regions. I do not have to tell you that, in Newfoundland and Labrador, that status quo has never allowed us to serve our emerging communities, which does considerable harm to our development.
As the time I was given has likely run out, I will conclude my presentation here.
Mr. Chair, ladies and gentlemen of the committee, on behalf of the francophones of Newfoundland and Labrador, we thank you for your attention.
