Official Languages Committee on March 9th, 2016

[François Choquette, NDP, Drummond, QC]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Thank you very much for being here today. I'm glad you could attend this meeting. I asked for your presence because I think we are here to protect both official languages.

Yes, I saw on the map that you are around 1% of the presence around the centre of Quebec. There is not that much in Drummondville exactly, but there are some communities in my riding, in Durham-Sud and Saint-Félix-de-Kingsey. There is a little community and—

[Dan Lamoureux]

There is Thetford Mines too, I think.

[François Choquette, NDP, Drummond, QC]

It's not my riding. Yes, it's around Centre-du-Québec also.

My question is.... Those communities are decreasing because the young people don't stay there. Of course, there is Montreal. I think that when people in Quebec see anglophones as a threat, they are thinking about Montreal. When they think about the other communities, I don't think they see them as a threat. On the contrary, there are a plus value, I think.

How can you have those communities not only survive,

but thrive.

What do you think you need for that?

[Sylvia Martin-Laforge]

One of the reasons the English-speaking community moves away....

Moving away from one region to Montreal is one issue, but moving away from Montreal to Toronto or somewhere else is the biggest issue.

We have an incredible brain drain of our youth and of our middle class. What we hear from the youth especially is they don't see themselves visibly demonstrated in Quebec through the media. They just don't see themselves. When you don't see yourself, whether it be in Drummondville, Granby, or Coaticook, you don't feel that you belong.

One of the biggest strategies that has been working in Gaspé is increasing the sense of belonging for youth, and the families of youth, to the Gaspé. I come from the townships. You can take the girl out of the townships, but you can't take the townships out of the girl. I haven't lived there for years, but I still think it's home. It's the notion of belonging.

I'm an anglophone from the townships. I spoke English. I spoke French. I think what's important in Quebec is to find strategies to increase the sense of belonging and identity. Now, that's complicated. You need long-range programs. You need five-year benchmarks. You have to figure it out, but these are the kinds of strategies that are needed.

[François Choquette, NDP, Drummond, QC]

Thank you for that answer.

I think it was in October 2015 that you had a press release about access to justice in both official languages. It's really important. I know that whether in French or in English, we've had to fight for this for a long time. Right now I have a bill that asks for bilingualism for Supreme Court judges. I think it's a first step.

First of all I will ask what you think about this bill and the project to have bilingualism for Supreme Court judges, and about access in general to justice for both official language communities.

[Dan Lamoureux]

Personally, I support it very much. As a minority, if I am in front of a judge, I want to be able to speak my own language. I stress that judges must have the capacity to be bilingual. As much as I want to be judged in English in Quebec, I feel just as strongly that francophones outside of Quebec must have that same opportunity as well. To me it's a fundamental aspect of Canada, and we should be moving towards it, definitely. I very strongly feel that.

[Sylvia Martin-Laforge]

We've been supporting it for years.

[François Choquette, NDP, Drummond, QC]

Thank you very much for that.

You spoke about not having financial indexation. I heard that you are going to work with FCFA, who are here today. How will this co-operation be managed and what are the common goals?

[Sylvia Martin-Laforge]

Working together on behalf of minority communities has always been, for the FCFA and the QCGN, important.

We have believed at the QCGN—and this situation should change—that government is not helpful in assisting both communities to find their place in terms of funding, because sometimes the problems are asymmetrical but the solutions that come with funding are the same. When you're trying to apply a “same funding” program or strategy to an asymmetrical problem, it doesn't quite work.

I think both the FCFA and the QCGN recognize that some of our issues are the same but some of our issues are different. I think the government has to hear that and help us work this out, because we certainly don't want to be in competition. Competition is not the name of the game. We want to work together, but the government has to help us work together to come to some of these programming solutions.

[The Chair, Liberal, Denis Paradis]

Thank you, Mr. Choquette.

Mr. Lamoureux, you may go ahead.

[Dan Lamoureux]

One of the other issues has been mentioned, and I think it's a serious one for both organizations. It's the financial issue. Since 2008 our budgets have been decreased. We're still trying to maintain services to our partners, to our community, and it's becoming harder and harder all the time.

On behalf of QCGN I ask, could we please correct that? It's been since 2008.

[The Chair, Liberal, Denis Paradis]

Thank you.

Since the time is just about up, we are going to end this first round. I will ask Greg to share his time with another member who would like to speak.

[Greg Fergus, Liberal, Hull—Aylmer, QC]

Indeed, Mr. Chair, I will split my time with the honourable member for Sudbury.

Thank you, Monsieur Lamoureux and Madame Martin-Laforge.

As we know, it's not your first time before a parliamentary committee, either here in Ottawa or in Quebec City, so although my question will be brief, I'm hoping you can be very specific. What we don't hear from the witnesses doesn't end up on the record, so it's really important that we do this.

Thank you very much for coming.

As you know, I'm the member of Parliament from western Quebec, and we have an important anglophone community. Just to build on the last point, you were talking about support for francophones outside Quebec or for anglophones inside Quebec. When you talk about federal government core and project funding support, could you be pretty specific as to how we could help strengthen the community capacity and infrastructure for your organizations?

[Sylvia Martin-Laforge]

It's an operational question. There has to be a recognition that the English-speaking community needs to build capacity in certain files. For example, we do not have any youth groups. There is no youth group that is specifically funded to come and visit you. If you asked for a youth group in Quebec, there's no policy capacity. There are service deliverers, but no policy capacity for youth. They can't talk to you about the numbers and where they are provincially. It's the same thing with regard to seniors.

From a policy capacity, we could be much more helpful to the government if we could give you those numbers. I'll give you a good example. When Mr. Schiefke came on Saturday to our event for youth, he said that you were thinking about having a youth national council. I'm not sure how we would do that in Quebec, because we don't have the policy capacity. A youth person would go, but to speak on behalf of an official language minority community from Quebec would be difficult. That is not so difficult in different provinces in the rest of Canada, from a minority language perspective.

It's capacity. Build our policy capacity so we can help you fund—if it's possible—specific programs to be directly delivered to a target group.

[Greg Fergus, Liberal, Hull—Aylmer, QC]

Thank you very much.

With regard to the second question, I'm familiar with the debate on the potential changes to the English school boards in terms of public representation. Can you talk about how the Quebec committee, the QCGN, feels about that, as well as what role you think the federal government should be playing, if any, on the constitutional issue of minority language school boards?

[Dan Lamoureux]

In my capacity as president of QCGN, I am also the chairperson for Riverside school board on the south shore of Montreal. There are three basic areas that we as the QCGN relate to Bill 86.

There is the fundamental question of management and control. In the current context, through Bill 86 the management and control that we have as a minority group will be taken over by the cabinet and by the minister responsible.

I'll give you an example. I was with an MNA, Nicole Ménard, from Saint-Lambert on the south shore. I used an example. I said, “Imagine the Ontario cabinet deciding that they're going to tell you exactly how you're going to manage and control your minority schools. Imagine the uproar from the francophone community in Ontario. They would go bananas.” That's what's happening with us in Bill 86.

The other thing is that the governance structure that proposed Bill 86 puts into place is very convoluted. Especially important is section 23 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Section 23 refers directly to our capacity to manage and control. Having that stripped from us as a minority group is not something that we're going to take that lying down,

[The Chair, Liberal, Denis Paradis]

Thank you, Greg.

Dan, you have two minutes.

[Dan Vandal, Liberal, Saint Boniface—Saint Vital, MB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Many thanks to the witnesses for their presentation.

[The Chair, Liberal, Denis Paradis]

My apologies, Mr. Vandal, but it was supposed to be Mr. Lefebvre's turn.

[Paul Lefebvre, Liberal, Sudbury, ON]

We're all ready to ask our questions.

The reason you're here today is that we were preparing our priorities for the years to come and we wanted to hear from the people on the ground.

I appreciated your presentation, Madame Martin-Laforge. You have identified three or four priorities that we should get on immediately. I appreciate that. You were very succinct with that.

I'd like to go to how you're funded and your road map, la feuille de route. Maybe you can give us a bit more information on what percentage of the funding of the road map you receive, as well as what other sources of funding you have.

[Sylvia Martin-Laforge]

We've calculated that we get 23% of the road map funding.

I'm going to be really clear on the road map. Since its initial inception in 2002 with the action plan, it has not been able to capture and give the English-speaking community what it needs. The gaps have been there since the beginning, and they are policy gaps that have not been able to be fixed ever since.

People are working on it. They're trying, but there's no quid pro quo.

[Paul Lefebvre, Liberal, Sudbury, ON]

Can you give us an example?

[Sylvia Martin-Laforge]

I'll give you a big example. It's the biggest one. It's the elephant in the room. It's immigration.

The immigration department cannot do anything for Quebec, it would seem, and this has been going on since 2002. In the first road map, it was $9 million; in the second road map it was, I don't know, $20 million; and now it's whatever it is. I know that because I was there.

That's okay, I get that, but there's no quid pro quo. When the last road map was launched, it talked about education, community, and immigration, but we're not even in immigration. I had asked for the next road map to be called diversity, because at least they could do something with diversity, but it was never taken up.

If you say “immigration”, that tells the English-speaking community that we are excluded from a whole pillar of the road map, and you don't want that. That's my example.

[The Chair, Liberal, Denis Paradis]

Thank you, Paul.

I'd like to thank you very much for your appearance here.

We'll probably discuss it in committee, but we might have a session in the Eastern Townships over the summer. I'm not sure where, but maybe we can continue the discussion then. I'm sorry that we had to cut your time a little because of that vote today.

Thank you to both of you, and thank you to the people who are with you.

Thank you very much.

We will now take a two-minute break.

[The Chair, Liberal, Denis Paradis]

Order, please. We are resuming the meeting.

I would like to welcome Sylviane Lanthier and Suzanne Bossé, respectively, the president and executive director of the Fédération des communautés francophones et acadienne du Canada, or FCFA for short.

We will have 50 minutes together, as I have another meeting and will have to leave around five o'clock, or five to, at which point I will ask Mr. Nater to take over.

Without further ado, you may go ahead with your presentation. Then we will move on to questions and answers.