Hello Mr. Chair and honourable members.
My name is Isabelle Laurin and I am the executive director of the Association canadienne-française de l'Alberta, the ACFA.
Thank you for inviting us to appear before you today.
Let me say to begin that our chair, Mr. Jean Johnson, sends his regrets as he cannot be here this morning.
I would also like to thank the committee for undertaking this study on the Canadian census and the for recognizing its importance as a tool in implementing the linguistic rights of the French-speaking community, in Alberta and right across Canada.
I am here this morning with one of our lawyers, Mr. Jean-Pierre Hachey, who will give part of the presentation.
Also, I wish to inform you that the ACFA is preparing a more exhaustive report on these matters and will be sending the committee a copy of it on February 23.
Let me begin with a few words about our organization.
The ACFA has represented Alberta's francophone community for over 90 years. It coordinates and monitors the community's advocacy and development activities in collaboration with the other francophone organizations in the province.
The ACFA is also responsible for consultation with francophone organizations throughout the province and for all community development planning. In collaboration with the province's francophone organizations, the ACFA promotes francophone pride and culture throughout Alberta, and projects a positive image of Alberta's francophones in Alberta communities.
The ACFA fully supports the position of education stakeholders that the mother tongue question should be modified to make it more clear, and that questions about the language of instruction of parents and their children should be added.
Without knowing the number and geographic distribution of these individuals, it becomes very difficult for these school boards to reach all rights holders and fulfill their responsibilities. That being said, these demographic data are not only important fo the school boards, they are also essential for minority French-speaking communities and organizations such as ours that represent them to enable them to achieve other objectives aimed at enhancing their vitality.
For example, census data provide the federal, provincial and territorial governments with an understanding of where official language minority populations are and allow them to plan for adequate services in the minority language. In this regard, it goes without saying that richer data would be very useful to the federal government, in particular in its review of the Official Languages Regulations, which was announced last November.
One of the missions of community organizations is to reach French speakers in order to promote the French language and culture, create francophone spaces, and combat linguistic and cultural assimilation. To fulfill this mission, these organizations also have a strong need for accurate information on the demographic reality of their target population. Rich, complete data on French speakers would allow the ACFA and other community organizations to target their interventions and awareness-raising activities more effectively.
These data have also become necessary as a result of major demographic changes that have occurred in recent decades. The Alberta francophone community includes a growing number of immigrants, among whom are people who understand French better than English, but who have a mother tongue other than French.
Our francophonie also includes bilingual anglophones or allophones living in families where French has a strong presence or is even the primary language. There is also a growing number of children of exogamous or linguistically mixed couples. Some of those children have been raised in a bilingual environment and have learned French and another language from a young age. Others have not learned French until they started at one of our French schools or in an immersion program.
These new demographic realities reflect an evolving francophone community, and it is important for governments and community actors to have the best demographic information possible on this population in order to understand it better. In that context, it is particularly important to adapt the census questionnaire, for example, by changing the question on the mother tongue and the instructions that accompany that question, which suggest to many people that they must choose between their mother tongues.
I will now turn it over to Mr. Hachey, who will talk about the importance of this data for official language minority rights holders.