Mr. Speaker, in 1912, James Whitney's Conservative Ontario government prohibited the use of French as a language of instruction by adopting Regulation 17.
Father Charlebois and many collaborators, both religious and secular, joined together to confront this threat and, through a successful grassroots fundraising campaign, founded the newspaper Le Droit in order to keep francophone schools in Ontario.
The newspaper's first issue rolled off the presses on March 27, 1913, 100 years ago tomorrow. Since then, Le Droit has fought all the fights: for homogeneous school boards, for francophone colleagues, for linguistic duality and linguistic rights, for the Montfort Hospital.
My message today is for the more than 600,000 francophones in Ontario. Stay true to our language and our culture, and demand that Le Droit stay true to us. If the future belongs to those who fight, it is also up to our daily newspaper to fight with us.
Long live those who fight. Long live Le Droit, which is celebrating its first hundred years tomorrow.