Good afternoon, Mr. Chair and members of the committee.
I'd like to begin by thanking you for having invited our federation to inform you about the issues affecting francophones on the Pacific coast in connection with the modernization of the Official Languages Act. We are relying on you, as members of the Standing Committee on Official Languages, to protect minority francophone communities, particularly ours, because British Columbia is still the only province without any language legislation or policies on services in French.
I am here today to ask you to consider three amendments, two of which are joint, and a further one that is essential to our community and on which we will therefore spend more time. The organization that represents us nationally, the FCFA—the Fédération des communautés francophones et acadienne du Canada—shares several of our priorities for the modernization of the Official Languages Act.
The first thing we are asking for is the designation of a single central agency responsible for coordinating the implementation of the act.
The second is an amendment to Bill C-13 to create a government obligation to help restore the demographic weight of francophones through francophone immigration.
Last but not least, our request specifically pertains to the residents of British Columbia and is intrinsically tied to our court appeal, which led to the Federal Court of Appeal verdict on January 28. We have a specific existential issue tied to the federal-provincial agreements. Bill C-13 should contain an automatic process for the inclusion of a francophone component in all agreements signed by the federal government. I deliberately use this terminology to avoid the words "language clauses", because we know that this appears to have created a degree of reluctance thus far.
In British Columbia, we have experienced these agreements in a particular way, by means of the devolution agreements. These are not traditional administrative agreements for a program or a shared field of jurisdiction. The justice ruled that the province was sovereign with respect to the devolution at issue for the duration of the agreement. However, owing to this process, or these clauses, we have been systematically losing our services, because British Columbia does not have any language legislation or policies with respect to French-language services. We would like the act to be more specific with respect to the devolution agreements.
As we have already mentioned, without this amendment, the modernized Official Languages Act would at best have an impact in the field; at worst, it would sanction the erosion of the services to which we are entitled, and thereby contribute to the gradual decline in the number of francophones in Canada, as reported in the latest census. Without this amendment, we could neither support nor approve an exercise that our citizens would perceive as a completely fruitless political gesture.
To conclude, we expect the committee to make a strong commitment in order to avoid missing this unique opportunity to decisively strengthen the Official Languages Act and to guarantee the survival of French everywhere in Canada for the next 10 years.
Thank you.