Mr. Speaker, there was not really a question at the end of that but I certainly caught the gist of the member's comments. I can try and understand historically some of the frustrations, not being from Quebec.
Overall the French culture and the French language have done very well within the Canadian context. The people the member mentioned who went south into the United States were not able to hang on to their culture and their language by and large and they have lost that and have become assimilated.
As I mentioned earlier, there were wrongs in the past. To take note of them and try to rectify them where we can is obviously what Canadians have tried to do. A further mistake would be to
try and redress past wrongs in a way that exacerbates another problem somewhere else.
Our motion is to try and get at the nub of the issue which is where numbers warrant and where there is significant need for the French language outside of Quebec then those services should be provided; likewise in Quebec where there is significant demand for the English language.
I will use my own province as an example. French barely makes the top ten languages in British Columbia. Chinese is by far the second most frequently used language. In my own riding people who are either unilingually German or use German as their mother tongue outnumber French-speaking people perhaps 200 to 1.
Where there are numbers and where we can justify it and where we can financially afford it, for that reason, because we want to provide it, I say let us provide it. We cannot have a Canada wide policy to try to redress some wrongs from the early part of this century. It is not practical. I do not think we can afford it. I do not think it redresses those wrongs and makes people feel better. If it did we would have unanimity. As it is we have people who are actually driven apart by the act.