Mr. Speaker, I remember a conversation I once had with a member of the Innu community. He said there are some 50 aboriginal languages in Canada, but only four of them have a critical mass, meaning that enough people know them and use them daily to give those languages a chance to survive in the long term. In other words, an overwhelming majority of these cultures are on the verge of dying.
I would like to put the following questions to my colleague. When we lose dozens of ancestral languages like these, what do we lose? Does the issue go beyond the financial aspect? Why should we invest to preserve these languages?