Good day to you all.
Thank you for inviting me to talk about this very important bill which seeks to update the Official Languages Act.
My presentation deals with the fact that schools and day cares are key institutions for the transmission of francophone language, culture and identity.
We have to right the wrongs of the past and to do so, we absolutely have to update the Official Languages Act. Assimilation is an institution in western Canada. Thanks to the efforts of Dalton McCarthy, who wanted “one language, one country, one flag,” it was illegal to teach in French in certain provinces outside of Quebec, including Saskatchewan, until 1969.
In 1885, they hanged Louis Riel. Afterwards, there were massive assimilation efforts to erase the francophone population.
In 2021, we see that even Quebec francophones are being assimilated into anglophone culture. We need the Official Languages Act to be enforced asymmetrically in Quebec, just as it should be outside of Quebec.
I'm now going to talk about the number of French-language schools in each province and territory outside of Quebec. In 2021, there were only 707 francophone schools for 173,000 students. That can seem like a lot, but it is just a tiny percentage compared to the number of students in English-language schools.
In Alberta, for example, there are only 3,660 students in French-language schools. In Ontario, the biggest province, there are 76,000; in British Columbia, there are about 6,500 students; in Prince Edward Island, there are only 1,163. In Manitoba, you're looking at 6,000 students and in New Brunswick, about 30,000. Nova Scotia has only 6,500 students and Saskatchewan approximately 2,000. Newfoundland and Labrador counts only 350 students and in the Northwest Territories and the Yukon, that number is 221 and 343 respectively. I was in Nunavut yesterday, I've actually just come from there, and the school board has only 115 students.
You can see that there is a huge disparity in the numbers of students and that some numbers are low.
If we come back to Saskatchewan, we can see that there are approximately 2,000 students in 15 francophone schools. However, the total number of students in Saskatchewan is 110,000. The number of students in French-language schools does not even represent 1% or 2% of the population. Moreover, it is hard to get Statistics Canada to provide figures on the number of rights holders in order to justify the number of students needed to build schools. This is a priority issue. We still need to build a network of schools. We are lacking local schools. Students have to travel huge distances. There is a real lack of equality and a lack of space in many French-language schools everywhere outside of Quebec.
We need to bring in the non-rights holders in order to right the wrongs of the past and welcome students from immigrant families. The appeal launched by the Northwest Territories on the right to take in non-rights holders will be heard by the Supreme Court of Canada during the winter of 2023, and we are hoping that the court will rule in our favour.
There is also the issue of insufficient funding for francophone school boards. As I said it earlier, I was in Iqaluit last week, and they are still lacking the necessary funds to have administrative officers and train them.
You will see eight recommendations in my document.
The federal government should pay 50% of construction costs for a network of local schools everywhere in Canada. We also have to do something about immigration. The percentage of francophone immigrants should be brought up to 12% by 2024 and 20% by 2036, because immigration is important to us and we need to have a way to counter assimilation. Even amongst immigrants, the assimilation rate is very high.