Mr. Speaker, the Lord tour, as orchestrated by the Conservatives, was a ploy to delay doing something about the already well-known needs of francophone communities, needs that have been growing as ethnolinguistic assimilation has been decimating their numbers at an ever-increasing rate for the past six censuses.
The mere fact of having eliminated the court challenges program is totally unacceptable. The fact that they have had almost two years to come up with a second official languages plan, but that there is less than nothing on the table speaks volumes.
The fact that the Minister of Canadian Heritage, Status of Women and Official Languages has not yet signed the second action plan proves that the anti-French-language and anti-French-culture neo-Reform ideology is alive and well in the federal government.