Good afternoon.
Thank you for the opportunity to speak to you.
L'Action nationale was founded 105 years ago and is the oldest journal in Canada. It was established to promote and defend the French language across our land. We have always remained faithful to this statement of principle, which enlists all francophones in North America in the same struggle. All French speakers of America share a community of interest.
From the 105 years of work during which we have focused serious attention on the development of minority rights and all aspects of the situation of French speakers, two trends seem undeniable to us today.
The first is demographic erosion, a dynamic whereby French speakers across Canada increasingly find themselves in the minority, in Quebec and elsewhere. This trend naturally does not manifest itself universally in the same way.
In addition to this first trend, which may be explained as the result of demographic pressures and societal preferences driven notably by immigration policies, family policies and various community development support measures, there is a second: the mismatch between legal and constitutional frameworks, both of which, however, are the most powerful instruments in mitigating minority-creating dynamics, a fact recognized in the literature around the world.
French has not yet been recognized as legitimate, and the endless, exhausting struggles of the minorities and Quebeckers who must endure the competition between languages and among various authorities attest to a fundamental defect, or a fault in the design of the Official Languages Act. It is sociologically indefensible to suggest that the situation of French in Quebec is perfectly symmetrical with that of English in Canada and, likewise, with the situation of anglophone and francophone minorities. They cannot be viewed as equivalent. There are not two majorities in Canada; there is only one, and it is an anglophone majority, a representative group of which lives in Quebec.
French is declining everywhere, including in Quebec. This is an obvious sign that the Official Languages Act has missed its target and that its design flaws have been exacerbated by the actions of Ottawa, which has created a distorted dynamic through its spending power and interventions in Quebec's anglophone community and institutions by contributing to an overfunding of programs. I won't cite the figures that many experts have established and that common sense tells us are obviously correct. The lot of Quebec's anglophone minority cannot be compared to that of any francophone minority in Canada.
On the one hand, these interventions and design faults, which put Quebec anglophones on the same footing as minority francophones elsewhere in Canada, have expanded the disparities in the way the communities have been treated. On the other hand, Ottawa's interventions have helped fund a privileged status for anglophones.