Thank you very much for your question.
We all know that being employable and being employed are key indicators and factors for ensuring the vitality of any minority community. Guess what? Here in Quebec, the major employer is the Government of Quebec. The drawbridge of that château has been pulled up against English-speaking Quebeckers. Barely 1% of the public service of Quebec are English-speakers.
Then we look to the federal government, saying that maybe we can get our jobs there. Guess what? In all of the federal institutions operating in Quebec that come under the Official Languages Act as it is right now—which is over half of them—English-speaking Quebeckers are under-represented. At Correctional Service Canada, of 3,800 employees in Quebec, 110 are English speakers.
If we look at our unemployment rate, it's higher than the majority population. Our median income is the lowest amongst all of official language minority communities in Canada. Eighteen per cent of English-speaking Quebec lives below the low-income cut-off, compared to 12% for francophones in Quebec. Primary and secondary enrolment in English schools is down 60% since the 1970s, yet our bilingualism rate is 69%. It goes as high as 82% amongst our young people.
We're graduating and we're educating them. They are fluently bilingual, but when they try to get a job here, the provincial government closes the door on them. The federal government opens it up a crack. The proposal of Minister Joly doesn't even address that issue. That's a key issue for the vitality of our community. It doesn't address any of those issues.