Mr. Speaker, I may have misspoken. I meant to say that the proportion of funding that goes to university services in French in Ontario is 3%. I was not talking about Franco-Ontarians. I think that the percentage of Franco-Ontarians whose mother tongue is French is 5.9%.
There is a serious underfunding of post-secondary institutions, including French-language ones, across Canada and Quebec. There is not a lot of research on these institutions, but the Commission nationale des parents francophones conducted a study in 1996 on primary and secondary schools entitled Où sont passés les milliards? or where did the billions go? That study showed that only 28.5% of the funding for the official languages program had been allocated to francophones outside Quebec for education in their mother tongue, while anglophone schools in Quebec received 47.7% of the subsidies.
When the Official Languages Act was brought in, English-language institutions in Quebec were already over-funded. Every Quebecker agrees that anglophones have the right to have English-language institutions by virtue of their historic minority status. That being said, the more a linguistic community has strong and well-funded institutions, the more powerful their language becomes.
The French language is at risk in Quebec because language transfers are too low. About 55% of language transfers go towards French, but 90% is needed to maintain the demographic weight of francophones. In Canada, 99% of these transfers go towards English. That is way off, and if the government wants to get back on track, it has to fund post-secondary institutions and health care. This is important, because it is directly connected to the attraction power of French. French-language institutions need to receive equal funding in the rest of Canada, as in Quebec.
This really needs to be reconsidered. To my friends who are advocating for francophone universities outside Quebec, I suggest that they use the example of funding for Quebec's post-secondary education system. In 2015-16, 33.5% of federal funding for post-secondary education went to the English-language system. In 2018-19, that figure was 32%.
We need a complete overhaul of the Official Languages Act. We need to get our heads out of the sand. The government took the first step when it admitted to the decline of French in Quebec, as in the rest of Canada. Now it needs to walk the talk.
Quebeckers get worried every time that French-language elementary and high schools or universities outside Quebec get funding, because education is normally a provincial jurisdiction. It is rather absurd that the federal government is required to provide this funding to the other provinces to ensure a minimum number of French-language institutions. There are not enough of them, though, and there is a lot of catching up to do. Assimilation progresses as time goes on. My compatriots in francophone and Acadian communities are fighting like the devil. This is laudable, and I think they are an inspiration to Quebeckers.
We need to join forces, and for that to happen, the Official Languages Act needs to be amended. We need to work on it together to reverse the decline of the French language.
Everyone has good intentions and is saying all the right things. When election time comes around, everyone makes lofty promises. After the election, as a certain singer once put it, “The day before the election he called you his son; the very next day, of course he forgot your name.” This is all talk and no action.
If nothing is done, the situation will be untenable in Quebec. We will not accept this decline of French. Things are very difficult in the greater Montreal area. Francophone students are in the minority in French-language schools. Francophones, people whose mother tongue is French and who speak French at home, are becoming a minority. All indicators are pointing in that direction, unless there is a big shift, a fundamental change.
What we heard from the minister yesterday at the Standing Committee on Official Languages was not at all reassuring. Nobody other than the Bloc Québécois has conveyed Quebec's demands on the modernization of the Official Languages Act. We do have some allies, I do not want to point fingers at everyone.
What we want is for Quebec to be its own master when it comes to language policy and language management, and for the federal government to recognize that Quebec is part of the francophone minority in North America. We are surrounded by 350 million anglophones.
It is only natural for newcomers who settle somewhere to lean towards the majority. Everyone is like that. Whether in Quebec or anywhere else in Canada, the majority is anglophone. The majority on the continent is even more so. That is why French must remain the common language in Quebec.
In my view, if the government really wants to ensure the future of French outside Quebec, then there should be territories. I think Acadians were or are demanding community governance in some places. It came very late. The first public high schools in Ontario—