Mr. Speaker, last week, in its Saturday issue, The Globe and Mail revealed alarming statistics concerning francophones outside Quebec, despite the Official Languages Act passed 25 years ago.
In fact, francophones have never been so vulnerable. More than a third of francophones outside Quebec speak English at home and their rate of assimilation is at 36 per cent. It is as high as 75 per cent in British Columbia and 70 per cent in Saskatchewan.
Instead of helping francophone and Acadian communities in Canada, federal institutions are speeding up their assimilation. The refusal of the Minister of Canadian Heritage to put pressure on cable companies such as Rogers, Laurentien Cable and Cogeco, which recently decided to eliminate several French--
language channels from their basic service, paints an even darker picture of Canadian federalism.