Madam Speaker, it is with great honour and pride that I rise today on behalf of the Bloc Quebecois to draw attention to the Journée internationale de la Francophonie.
This day is especially important for all Quebecers and all francophones in the rest of Canada, whose collective future is necessarily tied to that of la Francophonie as a whole.
Listening to the Minister of Foreign Affairs tell us proudly that 8.5 million Canadians are French-speaking, I could not help but reflect on the sad situation in which francophones outside Quebec find themselves.
If today we are celebrating this memorable day, this does not necessarily mean that we must ignore the bad position the French language is in everywhere else in Canada. Contrary to what the Prime Minister said, there are no longer one million Canadians outside Quebec for whom French is the language spoken at home, but only 640,000.
In actual fact, there are not 8.5 million people in Canada who still speak French at home, but only 6.3 million. That is 2.2 million fewer than suggested by the minister, if you exclude those who barely know the language.
In relation to the total population, this also represents a decrease in the francophone population in Canada as compared to 1981.
Instead of getting better, the situation of the French language outside Quebec is deteriorating. No wonder that the minister is trying to embellish reality, when in fact francophones outside Quebec are being assimilated at an increasing rate. The rate of assimilation is even as high as 75 per cent in British Columbia. We are pleased-