Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I fully agree with my colleague, Mr. Godin. I'll support this motion. It's very important that this committee study this urgent issue.
The government has maintained two things throughout this whole WE issue. The first is that the bureaucrats recommended that the government proceed in delivering this program through the WE Charity and that the government, the Liberal cabinet, were just simply passive bystanders in this recommendation and simply accepted the bureaucrats' recommendation.
Initially, when this whole issue came up, Minister Ng's office, for example, said that she had not met with the WE Charity. It later came to light that she had met with them on April 7. Minister Chagger initially said that she had had no conversations with the WE organization, and then it later came to light that she had spoken with them on April 17. In fact, I think that came to light yesterday.
The WE organization initially delivered a proposal to the government on April 9, well ahead of the cabinet meeting that took place later in May, a month and a half later. Then we found out that Minister Morneau's office contacted WE to rework the application, clearly working with them quite closely in order to produce this memorandum to cabinet and the proposal from the WE organization.
This has all come to light and runs contrary to the government's assertion that it simply accepted the bureaucrats' recommendation.
Then the second thing the government has maintained throughout all of this is that the WE Charity was the only organization in this country, including the largest employer in this country, the Government of Canada, the public service, capable of delivering this program. Then we found out in recent days that they couldn't deliver it to a quarter of this country's population, to the 25% of Canadians whose mother-tongue official language is French.
I think this committee should be seized with this issue. I've sat on this committee for a number of years, and I can tell you, Mr. Chair, that we have been seized with issues far, far smaller than this. This is a billion-dollar program that was being proposed that would affect Canadians from coast to coast to coast, 25% of whom speak French as a first language.
This program is of the scale of the road map for official languages that we've had ever since Monsieur Dion proposed the first federal action plan for official languages, called the “Dion plan”, some 15 years ago.
That action plan was for a billion dollars, and we held, I think, easily dozens and dozens, if not 100, meetings studying those plans and coming up with reports on how to improve the next five-year action plan on official languages. Surely we can spend a few meetings looking at the impact on official-language minority communities and official-languages communities of a billion-dollar program that would have been be delivered by an organization that couldn't deliver it to a quarter of this country's population.
For those reasons, I hope that the committee supports the motion and that we get some expeditious hearings on this to ensure that we protect French-language minority rights in this country.
It's at times of crisis that our institutions are tested, and they either endure that test and come out stronger because of it, or they crumble. We've already had incidents during this pandemic where official-language communities are not being respected. We had an issue when Health Canada waived francophone, French language, requirements for health devices. It may be excusable because of the pandemic, but we have a responsibility as a committee to protect French language minority rights and majority rights in this country, as we do for other official-language minority communities in Canada.
Therefore, I hope this committee supports this motion.
Thank you.