This motion takes a differentiated approach as well and leaves in everything involving francophones outside Quebec. I will now introduce our amendment.
In item (a) of our amendment, rather than saying that every person has the opportunity to learn a second language, we move that the federal government recognize “the duty to provide opportunities for everyone” to learn a second language. In Quebec, it's mandatory to learn English. We believe that the same thing should be true in Canada and that everyone should be able to learn French.
Next, with respect to item (b), lines 23 to 30 are covered later on, as you will see. The part that remains to be removed concerns the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, whose mandate is to serve the francophone minorities across the country, among others.
In item (c) of our amendment, we move to replace the following passage in the bill:AND WHEREAS the Government of Canada recognizes the importance of the contribution of francophone immigration to enhancing the vitality of French linguistic minority communities and that immigration is one of the factors that contributes to maintaining or increasing the demographic weight of those communities;
with
AND WHEREAS the Government of Canada recognizes the importance of remedying the decline in the demographic weight of French linguistic minority communities, including by fostering the re-establishment and growth of their demographic weight; AND WHEREAS the Government of Canada recognizes the importance of francophone immigration in enhancing the vitality of French linguistic minority communities, including by fostering the re-establishment and growth of their demographic weight;
The two lines removed from item (d) in our amendments, “AND WHEREAS the Government of Canada recognizes the presence of English or French linguistic minority communities in each province and territory”, are repeated later. Clause 2 of the bill would therefore continue with the following:
AND WHEREAS the Government of Canada recognizes the diversity of the provincial and territorial language regimes that contribute to the advancement of the equality of status and use of English and French in Canadian society, including that the Constitution of Canada provides every person with the right to use English or French in the debates of the Houses of the Legislature of Quebec and those of the Legislature of Manitoba and the right to use English or French in any pleading or process in or from the courts...
In item (e) of our amendment, we propose to rephrase the sentence that the Quebec Charter of the French Language provides that French is the official language of Quebec by adding “and common” after the word “official”. This would make French a common language that help all people to communicate with each other, an essential factor for social cohesion, in my view.
In item (f) of our amendment, we move to replace the three final paragraphs of subsection 2(3) of the bill with the following:
AND WHEREAS the Government of Canada recognizes the presence of English or French linguistic minority communities in each province and territory and that Quebec's anglophone minority and the francophone minorities in the other provinces and territories have different needs; AND WHEREAS the Government of Canada recognizes that the existence of a majority-French society in a Quebec where the future of French is assured is a legitimate objective and a fundamental principle of the Canadian official languages regime;
So we kind of return to what we were saying earlier. If French doesn't survive and flourish in Quebec, that would affect the entire Francophonie in Canada and North America and, essentially, all linguistic diversity. I feel it's important to recognize that.
There you have it, that summarizes our amendment.