Madam Speaker, it is once again my honour to rise in the House to talk about official languages and the importance of promoting the French language across the country.
On November 21, as a language crisis rocked Ontario's francophone community, I again appealed to the Liberal government about the Ford government's disastrous decision to eliminate Ontario's Office of the French Language Services Commissioner and scrap plans to build a French-language university in Toronto. That decision is affecting not only Franco-Ontarians, but also francophone communities across the country.
Francophones have a well-earned reputation for fighting for their rights and their language. At every opportunity, the Prime Minister says that he stands up for francophone communities, but at this point in time, nothing is happening and Franco-Ontarians are paying the price for political inaction.
I want to start with Ontario's French-language university. In an open letter published in Le Devoir on November 21, 2018, historians from the Institut d'histoire de l'Amérique française eloquently conveyed the importance of a university for a community:
...the abolition of Ontario's French-language university violates the hard-fought, vested rights of franco-Ontarians to post-secondary education in their own language....To our knowledge, this is the first time in modern history that a state has abolished a university for budgetary reasons.
...universities are crucial institutions to any community, and even more so if the community is in a minority situation.
Members will understand why it is so important to make every possible effort to defend Ontario's French-language university. It is now April 4, several months after the start of this crisis, and talks between the federal government and the Government of Ontario are going nowhere, as they have made no progress on protecting French-language services in the province, where some 800,000 French speakers still do not have their own university.
This is why people in Ontario and in all francophone communities across the country asked why the government did not take real action, including expressly allocating its share of funding for Ontario's French-language university in the budget. Unfortunately, the government is not listening to the people of Ontario.
In addition, Ontario plans to alter the mission and role of the Office of the French Language Services Commissioner, an independent body, by creating a French language services commissioner position within the ombudsman's office. Unfortunately, the French Language Services Commissioner will issue his last report on April 16. We must take action.
What more can the government do to improve the situation in Ontario?