Mr. Speaker, I thank the hon. member for Drummond for his very important question today. I also thank him for his work on committee.
I can assure the hon. member that our government is firmly committed to meeting its obligations under the Official Languages Act. I am a francophone like he is. I am Acadian. This file is important to me so I thank him once again for the question.
I will talk about the tests that he mentioned at the beginning of his question and I will also address some points regarding francophone immigration.
Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada involves the Official Languages Secretariat, which is tasked with ensuring that every aspect of our work complies with the Official Languages Act. The directorate also includes a team from official languages that works with every unit in the department in order to support our efforts to meet our target for francophone immigration.
The language tests my colleague mentioned are used when individuals apply for certain permanent residence programs as economic immigrants.
We are aware of the discrepancy that exists in the average price of the tests in French compared to the English. Organizations that offer these tests set their own fees based on their business models, taking into account several factors, including demand. Those organizations offer the same language tests to a wide range of clients. As soon as they receive the results of their test, clients can use them for many purposes, such as to apply to immigrate to Canada or to another country, or to apply for jobs.
As I said earlier, the organizations themselves set their fees, which can vary from one location to the next. The Government of Canada ensures that these language tests provide consistent, accurate, and fair assessments. They also represent the only proof of language proficiency accepted by the department for our economic immigration programs. At present, there are two organizations that administer the English tests and one that administers the French tests.
With regard to francophone immigration, I know that the member talked about the target of 4.4% that we want to meet. I can assure the member that, since we took office, our government has worked hard to promote francophone immigration. The minister and I spearheaded this effort, and I have met with many francophone groups since I was appointed as the department's parliamentary secretary. In March, we had a productive meeting in Moncton with Canada's provincial and territorial immigration ministers and the ministers responsible for the francophonie.
We agreed to continue to hold these meetings every year rather than every second year. We are also going to set up a committee of representatives who will soon address the issue of how we can improve francophone immigration to Canada. We are determined to make francophone immigration a priority for our government.
We do not just want to meet the target of 4.4%; we want to exceed it. All of the groups that I have met with have the same goal, to increase francophone immigration to Canada.
In that regard, we made changes to the express entry program recently by giving more points to people who are fluent in French. This will give an added advantage to people who speak French and who want to immigrate to Canada. It is a very good program.
That is what the groups asked us to do, and the associations that these people deal with told us very clearly that this is a program they can count and that it will certainly help boost francophone immigration.
New data recently revealed that the rate of francophone immigration has indeed increased. We are very proud of the progress we are making on this, and we intend to stay the course.