Mr. Chair and members of the Standing Committee on Official Languages, we are definitely pleased to accept your invitation.
I believe that, in some respects, cultural diversity is now on the defensive all around the world. The concept of nations is increasingly being undermined, and national and international languages are necessarily being shoved aside by the Americanization and anglicization of cultural preferences. We are now involved in a debate that vastly transcends the debates over Quebec, French Canada and Canada as a whole.
Today, we have chosen a more comprehensive approach than a mere study of Bill C‑13. This bill cannot address every aspect of the current inferiorization and trivialization of French, French-language culture, French Canadian identity and Quebec identity. It will take much more than Bill C‑13 to respond to that, and we will have to reconsider our approach and vision in order to do so.
First, I intend to raise a number of points for consideration. We have to understand that, when we discuss the French language, we need to look beyond partisan politics.
Members of Parliament should not limit themselves to the vision of their political parties, imagining that it's the one they should promote. I think we need to look beyond partisanship and try to understand the situation so that every party can develop its own approach to the problem. Consequently, our comments today will reflect that non-partisan stance.
There is little or no recognition of cultural and linguistic asymmetry in Canada. The federal government, in its own way, imposes its vision of bilingualism and multiculturalism on Quebec, while Quebec strives to protect and promote its identity, culture and language within its borders in order to make French the only official and common language in Quebec.
In addition, the symmetrical vision of the status of English and French results in inequality. There is nothing wrong with acknowledging that status. However, when we realize that French, an official language, is a minority language and, what's more, that it is declining and regressing, we need to abandon the symmetrical approach as it applies, not to the equality of status of the languages, but also to the resources that are made available to Quebec and the francophonie outside Quebec.
Furthermore, federal resources are inadequate. If French regresses as it is doing, that is obviously due in large part to the federal vision. Funding for the creation, production and dissemination of a strong culture that can promote and spread the French language must absolutely be increased, and by a large margin.
These thoughts transcend partisan politics. That's true. You need only consider the way English-language post-secondary educational institutions in Quebec are overfunded relative to the historical weight of the minority population, and even the English-mother-tongue population, which represents 7.6% of Quebec's total population, all of which results in an underfunding of French-language institutions. What I'm talking about here are reputation and prestige. As I just said, this results in the underfunding of French-language university institutions since 30% of available funding is invested in English-language post-secondary institutions.
How is it that everyone across Canada, including in French Canada and Quebec, acknowledges that French is declining?
I'm not asking you to answer that question, but how do you explain why the organizations that work to promote and advance the majority official language in Canada…