Mr. Speaker, the annual report Official Languages in Federal Institutions shows beyond a shadow of a doubt that there is still a long way to go to reach true fairness for the French speaking citizens of this country.
The act could have been a development tool for francophone and Acadian communities in Canada by ensuring access to the public service in French. Unfortunately, the way the government views and implements its mission, it is making only Quebec bilingual. Is it the government's aim to destroy the stronghold of the French speaking community in North America?
Let us look more closely at some figures.
In Quebec, where the English speaking population is 10 per cent, the federal public service has 52.7 per cent bilingual positions, that is 15,945 out of a total of 30,234 positions. If the same principle were applied to Canada as a whole, the number of bilingual positions should be 30,666 instead of 7,465. Therefore, there is a glaring and shameful deficit of 23,000 French or bilingual positions for francophones.
For my colleagues' benefit, let us take a look at the data province by province. Reform Party members who think that bilingualism costs too much should be happy to see that so little is done in that regard. The Northwest Territories should have 122 positions instead of 39; Yukon, 38 instead of 7; British Columbia, 1,600 instead of 394; Alberta, 1,564 instead of 395; Saskatchewan, 672 instead of 175; Manitoba, 2,238 instead of 565; Ontario, excluding the National Capital, 9,136 instead of 2,762; Nova Scotia, 2,755 instead of 750; Newfoundland, 132 instead of 63; and New Brunswick, 12,339 instead of 2,680.
In conclusion, in this year of the 25th anniversary of the Official Languages Act, the government has chosen to move the clock back 40 years by transferring the operations of the Collège militaire royal de Saint-Jean to Kingston, where Premier Bob Rae used too narrow an interpretation in determining that the number of French-speaking people in that community did not warrant it being declared a bilingual district.
The Treasury Board and this government therefore do not give us much to rejoice over, and this anniversary, on September 7 next, should rather be considered as a day of mourning, with the Canadian flag at half-mast.