Mr. Speaker, during the 2006 census, an anonymous email went around encouraging francophones to say they could not speak English even if they could.
At the time, heads of francophone organizations across the country told their members to respond truthfully and we have every reason to think that they did.
Four years later, the Ottawa Citizen is trying to stir up controversy. The face of Canada's francophone population is changing thanks to newcomers whose first official spoken language is French, even though it is not necessarily their mother tongue and they do not speak English.
In response to the Ottawa Citizen article, representatives from Statistics Canada have said that they never talked about a conspiracy or suggested that francophones had lied in providing census information. They also suggested that factors other than the anonymous email might explain the decrease in the number of bilingual francophones in the country between 2001 and 2006.