Don Boudria

[Government Response To Petitions, April 20th, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, pursuant to Standing Order 36(8), I have the honour to table, in both official languages, the government's response to four petitions.

[Questions On The Order Paper, April 19th, 1994]

I ask, Mr. Speaker, that the remaining questions be allowed to stand.

[Questions On The Order Paper, April 19th, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, question No. 23 will be answered today.

Question No. 23-

[Government Response To Petitions, April 19th, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, pursuant to Standing Order 36(8), I have the honour to table, in both official languages, the government's response to several petitions.

[Supply, April 18th, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, this will be one of the shortest speeches I have ever delivered. I think we have about three minutes left.

I am pleased to take part this afternoon in this debate on the Official Languages Act.

I do not agree with this business of territorial bilingualism.

I represent a riding in the province of Ontario, where the majority of people speak English. According to the principle of territorial bilingualism, as defined in the motion before the House, English would be the predominant language of the other provinces, hence of my province of Ontario. Most of the people in my riding are French, and they live in a province where the vast majority of people speak English. Like myself, almost 70 per cent of my constituents have French as their mother tongue. According to the hon. member, in such a case, territorial bilingualism would apply at the riding level, but that would not work either. What would such a policy do to some of the communities in my riding, to the 35,000 anglophones living in my riding?

Thirty-five thousand anglophones in my riding, if you applied this territorialism at the riding basis, would be denied their rights; 65,000 if you applied it on a provincial level. That is how impossible that proposition is.

I would have liked it if we could have used today's debate to criticize the flaws of the Official Languages Act, since all legislation has flaws, and to suggest changes to the Official Languages Act to ensure it can better serve the people of Canada, and by that I mean the unilingual people of Canada, because if the population were already bilingual, we would not need an Official Languages Act.

Neither the member for Quebec-Est nor I need this legislation, for we are both fluently bilingual, but the people we represent have the right to be served in their own language. It is for them that it is important to have an Official Languages Act, not for the member for Glengarry-Prescott-Russell personally and not for my colleague who is also a Franco-Ontarian, sitting across the way, from the riding of Québec-Est.

So I would have liked to learn today how we could use this Official Languages Act to unite both founding peoples of this country, not to divide them. That is the topic I would have like to have debated today. Speaking of the history of these two great peoples, I heard one member speak earlier of her ancestors who came here around 1640-mine arrived in La Prairie in 1680-and of all the other members who are new Canadians who came here a few years ago, like some of my colleagues in this House, or whose ancestors have been here almost forever, as in the case of our native colleagues. So I regret that we had this debate today, especially with this slant; I would have preferred it to be otherwise, needless to say.

[Supply, April 18th, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, sometimes I find it hard to keep calm when I hear some of the comments being made across the floor.

First of all, the hon. member claimed that, according to the report of the Commissioner of Official Languages, the Official Languages Act was not working. Nothing could be further from the truth.

I am sure all Canadians watching the House of Commons on television today know the Commissioner of Official Languages is an ombudsman. It is his role to point out any shortcomings, which there always will be, in any society. It is his role to identify them. Not in order to condemn this government or the previous government or anyone at all, but to improve the system.

Similarly, the hon. member opposite raises questions during Question Period not, I hope, to say that the people sitting on these benches are a terrible bunch, but to improve the system and make this Parliament more effective. Well, the Commissioner of Official Languages does the same thing, to improve the act and not to condemn it.

Second, I wish the hon. member opposite would explain his calculations. First of all, he chose to discount public servants working in the National Capital Region as far as minority language services are concerned. Does he not know that in addition to the national role played by public servants in the National Capital area, these people also administer regional programs? For instance, half of all francophones in Ontario, perhaps as many as 150,000, live within a radius of about 100 kilometres of this city outside Quebec. They are not served by regional offices in other locations, they are served by offices here in Ottawa. When the hon. member artificially excludes people who work in Ottawa, does he realize that he is skewing the figures?

Finally, with respect to the future of francophones outside Quebec, one does not have to be a lawyer from Baie-Comeau to realize that there is more to this than protecting the rights of francophones, important though this may be. What has kept us alive as a group in this country is critical mass. I am a Franco-Ontarian, and personally I believe that in my country, Quebec has played a major role in helping my language survive. We must be realistic and look at the facts.

The United States has no Quebec with its critical mass. Did the francophones there survive? No. The French fact is mere nostalgia in Louisiana and nothing at all in the rest of the United States, although originally there were more francophones in the United States than in Canada. Why? Because they did not have the critical mass or percentage. And that is what the Prime Minister means when he says that the francophones in Quebec are important to the survival of us all in Canada. Francophones in Quebec have helped to differentiate us from the Americans. We owe them that. We are a different country largely because of them. And anyone who says that we can take this out of Canada and everything will remain the same is wrong. Never mind about being politically correct. The truth is right there.

[Petitions, April 15th, 1994]

Madam Speaker, I have a petition signed by a number of citizens of the riding of Etobicoke Centre. They humbly pray and call upon Parliament to take all necessary measures in legislation to protect the lives of the unborn.

(Questions answered orally are indicated by an asterisk.)

[Electoral Boundaries Readjustment Suspension Act, 1994, April 13th, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, I listened with great attention to the speech of the hon. member and I congratulate him on the discourse. He said, if I heard him correctly, that if the bill had a cap on the number of MPs at the present level of 295 members-I think he said 195 in his speech but I am sure he meant 295-he would have supported the bill.

That being the case, how can he justify the comments of his colleague who moments before him said that the bill distorted representation by population. If that is true, how could he vote for such a reprehensible bill?

[Electoral Boundaries Readjustment Suspension Act, 1994, April 12th, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, I apologize for interrupting a Franco-Ontarian colleague in such a flight of oratory. However, I invoke the rule of relevance, citation 459 in Beauchesne, which says that members persistent repetition or raise issues which clearly have nothing to do with the bill being considered.

It is very interesting to hear him talk about volunteers from his riding, but we must admit that it is just a little too much. This is stretching things out.

[Report Of Commissioner Of Official Languages, April 12th, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, earlier today, the Commissioner of Official Languages tabled his annual report.

As our language rights ombudsman, it is his role and his duty to point out the shortcomings in the system, not to complain about discrimination, as a member of the Bloc Quebecois was saying, but to improve the system by pointing out its defects. He has a role similar to that of an opposition party that reveals what is wrong in the government, to protect the interests of the people.

There is bad news, but there is also good news in this report. For instance, the Commissioner of Official Languages has commended the government for reinstating the Court Challenges Program. He also indicated that the rate of bilingualism among teenagers in Canada has risen in every Canadian province and territory. Furthermore, and this is an important point, the cost of providing bilingual services in Canada was approximately 30 cents per $100 of service provided or 0.2 per cent of the federal budget.