Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Good afternoon to all the members of the Standing Committee on Official Languages.
I'd like to acknowledge that I'm currently living in Lorette, a small village in southeastern Manitoba covered by Treaty No. 1, x the traditional territory of the Anishinabe, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota and Dene, and in particular the ancestral land of the Métis Nation.
I'd like to thank you for inviting me to testify on behalf of the Franco-Manitoban School Division, the only school division that covers all of Manitoba, on the francophone side, of course, with 24 schools and about 6,000 students who share a common language, French, and that provides a cultural and social picture of our magnificent francophone minority community.
You will no doubt have guessed that my comments today will be directly related to education. I know that education is not a federal jurisdiction, but rather a provincial one. However, as some of the people who spoke earlier mentioned, immigration cannot be examined in isolation.
I can't speak about the importance of francophone immigration to minority communities without mentioning the importance of inclusion as opposed to integration. I don't want to get into the semantic details of these two words, which are often used in different ways, but which we don't always understand. What is crucial to understand is that despite all the targets we would like to meet, successful immigration needs an inclusive and welcoming society. Without a form of social inclusion in which students and parents are stakeholders and contributors to the community, immigration will remain an attempt to integrate newcomers who have to adapt and who create ghettos. That's the worst thing that could possibly happen to our francophone communities.
In the document containing the statistical analysis of the 4.4% target, Raymond Théberge said, in 2003, that the primary objective of the strategic framework took a special interest in studying that 4.4% target. The goal was to increase the number of French-speaking immigrants to bolster the demographic weight in francophone minority-language communities.
The figures from the last census in 2019 showed that Canada had acquired 340,000 new residents. Of these, Manitoba had welcomed approximately 19,000, only 300 of whom spoke French, for a percentage of 1.5%. To this could be added those who speak both languages, but honestly, in the French-language education system, families that identify as speaking two languages rarely attend francophone schools, often owing to unfamiliarity with them—about which I will speak a little later—or simply because they are disillusioned about the fact that we have a province and a country that claims to be bilingual, but that is not.
So the target was 4.4%. In my view, that should be a starting point rather than an end in itself. It has not been reached since 2003, there's a further decline every year, and the gap continues to grow, meaning that our communities are stumbling along like a wagon with a broken wheel.
Without francophones, it's hard to create an educational community or a community school, a term we use in New Brunswick, which is very dear to us. It's also health, the economy, the arts, culture, sports, etc.
Unlike the majority-language schools, the minority schools are simply not required to provide education and programming that would be called "educational". There's a whole component made up of people's values, culture, heritage and identity that is very important and that there wouldn't be in a first-language school.
It's important to point to the Canadian Charter of Rights that now allows for rights holders in our schools, and to the parents who protested 25 years ago in front of the school division to ensure that we could have the "by and for".
So although it's a provincial jurisdiction, why should education and immigration go hand-in-hand? Immigration plays a key role in expanding the minority community school network. Most of the time, it's the place where the francophone community can get together, the key meeting point. The school is where a future generation can prosper in a spirit of equity and social justice.
I'll finish up with a small anecdote. I meet many parents who come to our schools. The first thing they ask is why they can't work in French in Manitoba? Why can't there be a French-language clinic in Manitoba? Why can't they be served in French? There is a feeling of disillusionment that leads them to withdraw their children from francophone schools to place them in anglophone schools because they want to make sure that they will be able to find a job when they grow up.
Thank you very much.