Thank you.
Mr. Chair and committee members, I'm the proud chair of the Fédération culturelle canadienne‑française, or FCCF. As you heard, I'm joined by Manon Henrie‑Cadieux, our strategic director of government relations, and Gabriel Poliquin, a lawyer specializing in minority language rights.
The FCCF has been the voice of the arts and culture sector in francophone and Acadian minority communities for nearly 50 years. Our network includes 22 national, provincial and territorial organizations. Through these groups, we represent an ecosystem of over 300 organizations across the country.
Our goal today is to contribute to your discussions on the perspective of the arts and culture sector. First, as a result of the legislator's contribution, the modernization of the Official Languages Act in 2023 formally recognized our sector as essential to the development and vitality of official language minority communities.
The FCCF's position is clear. The Treasury Board Secretariat's draft regulations for part VII must be reviewed to ensure that they reflect the intent of the legislator in modernizing the Official Languages Act.
Regulations inherently serve to provide guidelines for the implementation of legislation and to spell out the procedures for its enforcement. However, the current draft regulations provide so little clarity around how federal institutions must fulfill the obligations that they inevitably run counter to the intent of the legislator, who wished to strengthen these obligations.
The FCCF would like to draw your attention today to two recommendations for amendments to the draft regulations for part VII. I'll ask Manon Henrie‑Cadieux to outline these recommendations.