Good morning, Mr. Paradis, Mr. Nater, and Mr. Choquette.
Good morning, members of the Standing Committee on Official Languages. I'm Geoffrey Chambers, vice-president of the Quebec Community Groups. With me today is our director general, Sylvia Martin-Laforge.
Members of this committee are intimately familiar with the central role that education institutions play in the preservation of our official languages minority communities. Some of you have had leadership positions in these institutions, others have children enrolled in a minority system, and all of you continue to demonstrate an interest in and an understanding of the challenges these systems face, and in exploring ways in which the federal partner can help them survive.
The QCGN is here today to lend our support to the recommendations of the Quebec English School Boards Association and Fédération nationale des conseils scolaires francophones on how the census can be improved to improve planning and aid policy development in support of linguistic minority school systems. Both organizations have pointed out the importance of reliable, objective data on the numbers of rights holders under section 23 of the charter. This is data that is not always in the province's or territory's interest to collect.
Without doubt, a linguistic minority community cannot exist without schools that it manages and controls and without the structures that are required to manage and control those schools. It can neither manage nor control these institutions, nor hold provinces and territories to account, without accurate data that reflect our minority language education rights as defined in section 23 of the charter.
We offer the following recommendations to the committee for its study on the enumeration of section 23 rights holders.
One, focus on identifying and enumerating current and future rights holders. Do not get sidetracked in this exercise into investigating who is or is not a member of the English- or French-speaking communities in various provinces. These are also important questions, but definitional discussions that are accompanying the Treasury Board's current official language regulatory review should focus on rights holders. Data regarding minority language education is useful only when rights holders are solely evaluated. In other words, we can't make a recommendation or an argument to our provincial governments based on data that is not symmetrical with the rules of access. We do care about the rules of access, and under other circumstances we might be talking to you about them, but in regard to what we're hoping the census can provide for us, it is data on rights holders that is vital and that is not currently collected and not available to us from other sources.
Two, Statistics Canada must seek competent legal opinion in designing questions that enumerate section 23 rights holders. The resulting opinion must be publicly available to help all stakeholders in the discussion, including you, understand the complexity of minority language education rights. If you do not know who current and future rights holders are, how can you count them, and then how can you argue for services that they are going to require? Investment and establishment of resources can only be done efficiently if the data is good.
Three, during Tuesday's committee hearing, Monsieur Généreux asked Statistics Canada about the feasibility of adding a question to determine parental language of instruction preference for their children. We think this is a very interesting idea that should be pursued.
QCGN has a close relationship with Statistics Canada, which has an excellent consultation record with our community. We look forward to working with them on the questions that arise from our need to understand the matters that are being studied by the committee.
Thank you for today's invitation. I look forward to working with this committee and all that it does to support Canada's English and French linguistic minority communities.