Mr. Speaker, this will be one of the shortest speeches I have ever delivered. I think we have about three minutes left.
I am pleased to take part this afternoon in this debate on the Official Languages Act.
I do not agree with this business of territorial bilingualism.
I represent a riding in the province of Ontario, where the majority of people speak English. According to the principle of territorial bilingualism, as defined in the motion before the House, English would be the predominant language of the other provinces, hence of my province of Ontario. Most of the people in my riding are French, and they live in a province where the vast majority of people speak English. Like myself, almost 70 per cent of my constituents have French as their mother tongue. According to the hon. member, in such a case, territorial bilingualism would apply at the riding level, but that would not work either. What would such a policy do to some of the communities in my riding, to the 35,000 anglophones living in my riding?
Thirty-five thousand anglophones in my riding, if you applied this territorialism at the riding basis, would be denied their rights; 65,000 if you applied it on a provincial level. That is how impossible that proposition is.
I would have liked it if we could have used today's debate to criticize the flaws of the Official Languages Act, since all legislation has flaws, and to suggest changes to the Official Languages Act to ensure it can better serve the people of Canada, and by that I mean the unilingual people of Canada, because if the population were already bilingual, we would not need an Official Languages Act.
Neither the member for Quebec-Est nor I need this legislation, for we are both fluently bilingual, but the people we represent have the right to be served in their own language. It is for them that it is important to have an Official Languages Act, not for the member for Glengarry-Prescott-Russell personally and not for my colleague who is also a Franco-Ontarian, sitting across the way, from the riding of Québec-Est.
So I would have liked to learn today how we could use this Official Languages Act to unite both founding peoples of this country, not to divide them. That is the topic I would have like to have debated today. Speaking of the history of these two great peoples, I heard one member speak earlier of her ancestors who came here around 1640-mine arrived in La Prairie in 1680-and of all the other members who are new Canadians who came here a few years ago, like some of my colleagues in this House, or whose ancestors have been here almost forever, as in the case of our native colleagues. So I regret that we had this debate today, especially with this slant; I would have preferred it to be otherwise, needless to say.