Official Languages committee  Thank you. Mr. Chairman, co-chairs, and members of the committee, I am very pleased to speak to you today about the sources of current health and immigration statistics concerning health care and official language minority immigration outside Quebec. I also take this opportunity

Official Languages committee  We know full well that, when we ask people about their perceptions of the possibility of obtaining services in their language, we are not looking only at health but at all areas. When we conduct studies on literacy and ask people whether they have access to a library, those peopl

Official Languages committee  It is probably a different survey from the one carried out by Statistics Canada. I know for a fact that the Santé en français research network undertook many surveys on that topic. Researchers from the network also carried out many qualitative inquiries in which they ask people t

Official Languages committee  I am not familiar with the survey carried out by the FCFA. Normally, at Statistics Canada, we carry out pilot projects before doing the survey. The pilot projects are qualitative tests during which we ask people specific questions to see if they understand. That helps us validate

Official Languages committee  Statistics Canada has always tried to search for a compromise with respect to the size of samples. You know just as well as I do that the size of the sample is directly associated to the total cost of the survey. The objectives of the survey are taken into consideration, but the

Official Languages committee  I would say that health is the one area in which we have been able to obtain the most reliable estimates. The statistics cover the widest range of linguistic subpopulations in Canada. The same applies to the post-census survey.

Official Languages committee  As I was saying earlier, there are two major concerns for those working in the health care sector: offer of services and access to health care, as well as training of medical doctors. I know that the minority vitality survey, given the size of its sampling will allow us to obtain

Official Languages committee  We succeeded in obtaining a considerable sample in Quebec, not only for Quebec anglophones by mother tongue, but also for allophone immigrants who turn towards English. Since the concurrence between English and French is an important issue in Quebec, we significantly oversampled

Official Languages committee  We can adopt two approaches when we conduct a study in the field in an attempt to understand difficulties or obstacles. We can use a more qualitative approach whereby we meet with a representative of such an association who knows someone else, and by doing so, we build a small sa

Official Languages committee  Look, perhaps in New Brunswick...

Official Languages committee  As I was saying, it is surely...

Official Languages committee  New Brunswick is a unique case, as its population is one-third francophone, and francophones are concentrated in certain areas. Moreover, the reality is totally different from the reality in certain regions of Ontario and in most other provinces outside Ontario and New Brunswick.

Official Languages committee  According to the contacts and the meetings that we have had with specialists and stakeholders in the field, we do not know to what extent people are calling for services in French. If we were to decide to set up programs and to allocate funds to provide services in French, we nee

Official Languages committee  That is why we conduct the study on vitality. We want to know if it is important for these people to obtain services in French.

Official Languages committee  In the questionnaire, we ask why it is important for the respondent to obtain or not obtain services in French, or why he has not sought to obtain services in French. If this person did not try, it is perhaps because the service was not offered or because the person was reluctant