Thank you very much. It's a pleasure for me to be here today.
As Fatiha said, I represent the English-speaking provincial organization called the Community Health and Social Services Network. I'm going to give you a portrait with a lens on health and social services in the English-speaking community in Quebec, a community-based response to the COVID pandemic, the use of federal information and the importance of that information for the community.
As Fatiha mentioned, there is a network of organizations across the province. I gave a map to you prior to this meeting. I hope you had a chance to look at it. It gives you really interesting information about population size and proportion. We have over a million English speakers in Quebec and they're distributed all across the province. Each one is very different.
Health Canada has been supporting these networks since 2004 to improve their capacity to improve access to English-language health and social services. I can tell you that the work that we've been doing since 2014 was a critical element for these organizations to be prepared for a crisis situation, which we experienced with COVID-19. The community became a lifeline for the English-speaking populations in terms of finding and getting the information they needed.
I surveyed all 25 of our networks and 100% of them used information coming from the Government of Canada website. Of them, 56% of them used it on a regular basis, 44% used it occasionally and 89% said it was easy to find. The other ways that they found information from the Government of Canada was through partners who would refer them. Fatiha mentioned that members of Parliament themselves and their Facebook pages were critical resources.
These community organizations then used this information and distributed it to the English-speaking community through newsletters, Facebook pages, newspapers and websites. In some instances where they had very vulnerable populations, they actually hired professionals to help, for example, people on the Magdalen Islands who are English speakers, very unilingual English speakers, navigate the compensation information coming from the federal government. These organizations were a critical element in ensuring that the English-speaking community members got the information they needed that the government was providing.
I'll give you a quote. One of our networks based in the Outaouais surveyed its English-speaking community members about which resources they went to for information. Of those surveyed, 42% went to the Canada.ca website for information versus the 25% who went to Quebec.ca for information.
The federal government is still playing a really important role in making sure that the English-speaking community in Quebec gets the critical information it needs during a crisis.
As I imagine you've heard multiple times, the linguistic barrier becomes a really pivotal problem in a crisis situation. I think that the information that we were able to get from the federal government really complemented what the Quebec government was doing to ensure that the English-speaking community got information.
I think my time is close to wrapping up, so I'll stop there.