Mr. Speaker, I will simply answer that, in the current system, if you are a francophone and you want to get on in the Canadian Forces, you have to become anglicized. You do not have a choice.
I will not mention by name the many generals I met who are francophones but, as far as I am concerned, have become anglicized because they had no other choice. If you look at the composition of the Canadian Forces, francophones can be found in numbers in the lower echelons, but there are fewer and fewer as you move towards the top. Take Canadian generals for example. Among the 136 general we have in Canada-by the way it is inadmissible to have enough generals to lead 250,000 men when all we have is a small army-there is only a handful of francophones. And these francophones had to be twice as good as their anglophone counterparts to make general. And that is unacceptable.
It is true that we have more francophone generals in the army. On the other hand, you will notice that there are very few francophones among the top brass in the air force and the navy, and that is a shame. Someone mentioned earlier that only in Quebec can bilingual schools be set up. That is not true. We can see what is going on in Kingston; it has received much media coverage recently and the press does report hard facts. Kingston is a city where it is difficult for francophones to live. It is so.
By contrast-I would like to point out to my colleagues who may not be aware of this-in Quebec, the minority, which accounts for approximately 20 per cent of the total population, has its own elementary and secondary school system, its owns hospitals, two major universities in Montreal, namely McGill University and Concordia University. This minority also has a university of its own in the Eastern Townships. There is no comparison between the way Quebec has traditionally treated its minorities and how the rest of Canada does.
The rest of Canada has a long way to go to catch up to Quebec's way of treating its minorities since the beginning of the Canadian Confederation. I think that the military college in Saint-Jean is important as a symbol and, as such, if we are serious about Canadian bilingualism, it should have been preserved. I think it should have remained open. It was decided to abolish it, to do away with it. I maintain that this may be the worst decision made by this government. It could make even worse ones; its mandate is not over yet. But this far, this is certainly the worst. And the worst of it all is that they know it. They know that this was a bad decision and they have to live with it.