Mr. Speaker, this week the Commissioner for Official Languages presented his annual report and with it we have heard proposals from the Reform Party and the Bloc Quebecois to cut back provisions in the act or abolish it altogether. The Reform Party is suggesting that official language rights should be put entirely under provincial jurisdiction.
History shows that would be a complete disaster. The Bloc Quebecois supports the act for francophones outside Quebec but not for anglophones in Quebec. In this case there is a double standard.
The purpose of the act is to protect minority language rights in Canada and provide linguistic justice to the more than one million francophones outside Quebec and the more than 800,000 anglophones in Quebec.
As the commissioner points out in his report, the act is not always applied as it should be and there have been some setbacks. Without the act and without the commissioner things would be much worse. We should work to improve the Official Languages Act, not to destroy it.