Mr. Chair, I want to thank the committee for inviting me to appear.
The federal government does much, indeed very much, to protect and promote French in its institutions. The thrust of my remarks today is not to criticize the extent of the efforts it has made. What I want to focus on is the importance of properly targeting those efforts. The federal government, in practice, has been a very poor partner and has practised very little cooperative federalism in linguistic matters.
In the Official Languages Act, the federal government has stubbornly focused on the two official minorities without taking into consideration the fragile nature of French in its majority position in Quebec, where its decline is becoming clearer and accelerating. Bill C‑13 is designed in part to correct that problem, but I'm quite concerned that the solutions being put forward here remain only partial.
Federalism, by definition, inevitably presupposes the coexistence of several language regimes and policies. To achieve a degree of harmony and consistency, there must be an obligation to cooperate in the greater public interest. In the case of Canada, even the Constitution, which is both the supreme law of the land and the common act of all federal and federated entities, provides for asymmetrical language regimes and obligations.
The case before us today is that of Quebec. As section 90Q.2 of the Constitution Act, 1867, now expressly provides, Quebec is the only province and territory in Canada and North America where French is the official and common language. Quebec is the only jurisdiction where French is still, even today, in the majority, despite its decline.
Like the federal government, Quebec obviously has constitutional obligations toward its historical anglophone minority. It is important to reassure that minority. Neither the Official Languages Act nor the Charter of the French language can alter the rights guaranteed to Quebec's anglophone minority under the Constitution.
That being said, the central issue is the compatibility of language regimes. We must learn to harmonize, combine and supplement each other's efforts in order to refrain from putting Quebec in a situation where it must choose between advocacy of its own interests and its necessary solidarity with minority francophones elsewhere in Canada. We no longer want a federal policy that antagonizes or divides certain communities by pitting them against each other. Bill C‑13 is an attempt to correct this situation, and that's a very good thing.
However, to ensure that this intention or will of legislators is asserted, I would like to take the few moments I have left to outline four solutions that are designed to make the act more harmonious and to combine all these efforts.
First, in addition to the preamble to the act, in which a significant intention is stated, the bill must also include an interpretive provision and criteria. In that provision and those criteria, and in the powers that are delegated to the executive to make regulations and take measures, it is important that the act reiterate the express recognition of the objective of substantive equality and thus of differentiated treatment based on situation. It must also reiterate the federal legislator's intent to halt the decline of French in Quebec and to contribute to—