One major difference lies in our trajectory as a community.
We have been in Quebec for hundreds of years and the English-speaking community has built its own institutions. The institutions have been there for many years, built by the community, not the Quebec clergy at the time. Our ways of funding ourselves, funding our institutions, working with our youth come from a different place, because there was no help from government.
In the French-language communities
outside Quebec, there were clearly no institutions. In the rest of Canada, English-speaking communities found a different way to survive.
You can't compare what happened in Quebec to the English-speaking community to what happened to the francophones in the rest of Canada. That's important in policy-making and program support, because you don't have the same kinds of programs when a community has diminished in size or its institutions have diminished as a result of legislation and what has happened in the province.
A well-known Franco-Ontarian once said to me that in Ontario, for example, francophones are not seen as a threat but perhaps sometimes as a nuisance. I don't even believe that, because I think that in Ontario now, francophones are seen as being a very important contribution to the province.
In Quebec we are still, unfortunately, seen as a threat. It goes to Mr. Lamoureux's point about the fact that we speak English, and that is a threat. People forget that we have communities. I think, Mr. Généreux, that would be the most important difference. What are we protecting? We're not protecting a language. We're protecting a historic community and protecting people from other provinces and immigrants who want to come and join that community, not just the historic anglophones.