Mr. Speaker, on April 3, 2009 we learned that the part-time component of the second language assistant program Accent had been done away with, indeed eliminated without any warning by the Reform Conservative government.
Through this program, university students were hired as language assistants and organized a variety of cultural activities for students of French language and culture in minority communities, or for students in French immersion, depending on their location.
In 2008, 390 students became language assistants. The program worked well. It helped many people learning French to improve their knowledge through the cultural support the Accent assistants provided.
The program was appreciated equally by students and their parents and by the schools. It did not cost much: only $2.6 million annually.
Then, boom, the Reform Conservative government hypocritically and surreptitiously abolished the Accent program, with no transparency whatsoever. This program was greatly appreciated, in part as a tool to counteract assimilation and the loss of French in favour of English unilingualism.
There is so much to be done to fight the assimilation of French by English that every little bit helps. Abolishing the Accent program is just one more backward step in the battle against the Canadian cancer that is assimilation of the French fact.
The president of the Fédération des communautés francophones et acadienne du Canada, Lise Routhier-Boudreau, criticized the Reform Conservative government's lack of transparency with respect to this cut. She said, “Lack of clarity in the way the government does things is a shame, a real shame”.
On April 30, Claire Trépanier, interim director of the Bureau des affaires francophones et francophiles at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia told the Standing Committee on Official Languages how she thought the Accent program could be made more effective. She said:
There's already the Accent program at the federal level. It's a student monitoring program. The students we sent on mobility in third year to Laval University, for example, also benefited from the Accent program. We could imagine a combination of those two programs in which the student, through the Explore program, studies his second language, but can also work in his mother tongue, perhaps on a part-time basis.
Comments like that belong in the “solutions” category, not the “what can we do to get rid of a program that resists Reform Conservative assimilation” category.
When my Bloc colleague, the member for Rivière-du-Nord, told Ms. Trépanier that the Accord language assistant program had been cut, Ms. Trépanier said, without a moment's hesitation, “It must be restored”.
This is further proof that the elimination of the Accent program is another one of the federal government's very bad ideological moves.