Thank you very much.
Good afternoon, members of the committee. My name is Marlene Jennings, and I am the president of the Quebec Community Groups Network. Accompanying me is director general of the QCGN, Sylvia Martin-Laforge.
For the past decade the Government of Canada has been under pressure from official language minority communities to modernize the Official Languages Act. Led by the QCGN, English-speaking Quebeckers have actively participated in numerous consultative processes, which led to the Honourable Mélanie Joly's proposals last week on a way forward.
The QCGN's brief on modernizing the Official Languages Act, which was submitted to this committee in November 2018, was developed with the co-operation of a broad segment of the community sector serving English-speaking Quebec. We thank the organizations that took time to contribute.
What are English-speaking Quebec's expectations regarding a modernized act?
It remains that a central guiding principle of the Official Languages Act must be the equality of status of English and French. It must categorically guarantee this equality of status in all institutions subject to the act across Canada.
We're fully aware that the term “equality” has specific legal meaning. That is why the QCGN understands and supports an approach to implementing federal commitments to Canada's English and French linguistic minority communities that is adapted to the specific context and needs of different official language minority communities.
We understand that the French language requires special attention, and we acknowledge the data that demonstrates a national decline in the use of French and the demographic peril of francophone minority communities. We have just heard from Senator Joyal with regard to some of that demographic reality.
In the past, I have issued a statement, shared with the members of this committee, reaffirming our organization's commitment to respecting French as the official language of the province of Quebec and the ongoing work that we do to support and defend French in Quebec and in the rest of Canada.
However, we reject the notion that in the federal sphere, protecting and promoting French necessitates restricting the language rights of English-speaking Quebeckers. Too often our community is scapegoated or ignored. Enough of this. The majority of English-speaking Quebeckers remained in Quebec after the turmoil of the 1970s. We call Quebec home, and we understand our responsibility to learn and use French in the public space.
After all, it was a group of concerned English parents from Saint-Lambert who, in the 1960s, invented French immersion to ensure that our children could remain and be integrated into French-speaking Quebec. We are so perplexed that our schools were not even mentioned in the government's plans to increase support for French immersion.
Our community institutions—hospitals, libraries, post-secondary institutions—serve all Quebeckers, both in English and in French. After all, Jean-François Lisée famously learned English by joining a Scout troop in Thetford Mines. Paul St-Pierre Plamondon attended McGill University, as did Laurent Duvernay-Tardif. Harmonium got its start on CHOM FM.
Our community is not a threat to French. We are not “the others”.