Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you to the commissioner and his colleagues for being here today.
I chose to speak English today because I come from the beautiful province of Quebec. I guess I'm considered a member of the anglophone community of Quebec. My parents immigrated from Greece in 1957, and I came into the world a few years afterwards. When it was my turn to be registered in school, my mother—bless her soul—had the good foresight to say she wanted her daughter to go to a French school, because she wanted me to be able to compete and be educated with everybody else, realizing that in Quebec, francophones are the majority.
When she tried to register me in school at the time, we were not allowed. It was because I wasn't francophone and I wasn't Catholic. In those days, the school boards were based both on linguistics and religion. I was reading your annual report for 2023-24 while looking back at my own experience, and right now I feel that at times my Achilles' heel is my inability to speak French the way I would like to speak French. I feel comfortable in French, I work in French and I love the language. However, I learned it by working at McDonald's as a student; I learned it by working with my father and helping in his business later on; and, more importantly, I learned it when I was doing dictées with my children when I chose to send them to French schools.
The only way I could have been educated in French at the time was if my parents had had the means to send me to a private school, which they did not.
In your report, you say, “My office will continue to reach out to Canadians—particularly those in official language minority communities—to inform them of their rights, but we'll scale back our activities in schools.”
Given that schools are an integral and central part of official language minority communities and that it is mainly in schools that young people learn a second official language, why would you scale back your activities in schools? I would hate to see young people today in a position where they cannot learn both official languages. Why did you scale back?