Official Languages committee  I would reframe from answering that question as it involves projections or predictions. I will say however that there are always two sides to an issue such as actively offering services, in other words whether it is possible to use the services in question, and the public's perce

Official Languages committee  Surveys that are more qualitative in nature have been conducted in the field. I am going to say a few brief words about mixed or exogamous unions. People have said that they are a disaster, because as soon as francophones marry anglophones, they start to use English. However, res

Official Languages committee  Thank you for your question. I will comment first on the International Adult Literacy Survey which was conducted in 2003. The results for the country and the provinces were distributed last December. Next December, a monograph on the state of the official language minority commu

Official Languages committee  The Post-censal Survey on the Vitality of the Official Language Minority Communities has been discussed for a very long time. We, at Statistics Canada, knew that this was probably the only way of getting reliable data on a number of areas having to do with the official language m

Official Languages committee  The survey that we currently have in the field contains a module that deals with services offered by the federal government. We did a pilot test prior to this survey, and we agree that what we seem to be hearing—again, the data is piecemeal, since we only consulted a small sampl

Official Languages committee  My answer will apply specifically to New Brunswick. We definitely used the approach adopted by Rodrigue Landry from the Canadian Institute for Canadian Research on Linguistic Minorities, which is located in Moncton. Increasingly, in our studies, we break down New Brunswick into t

Official Languages committee  Exactly.

Official Languages committee  Exactly, and that is why in the Survey on the Vitality of official language minority communities, New Brunswick was broken down into three main regions. From memory, there were the North-Eastern region, the South, and the rest of the province.

Official Languages committee  Ontario is broken down into regions: the North, the South, the Toronto region, the Ottawa region and the rest of the province. This will provide us with information that will help us take into account the percentage of francophones in the regions. It is difficult to do the same t

Official Languages committee  With respect to birth rate among immigrants, upon their arrival, they often have a higher fertility rate than other Canadians. But over time as they settle in, a balance is created and the significant gap between immigrant populations and others no longer exists. To answer your

Official Languages committee  We do, of course, usually ask a question relating to health. The Canadian Community Health Survey, which I mentioned earlier, includes a number of health indicators. I believe there are about 120 or 130.

Official Languages committee  As everybody knows, the situation for anglophones in Quebec is far different than that outside Quebec, for a number of reasons. Clearly francophones outside Quebec are far older and more likely to need health care. Far more francophone seniors are unilingual. For these people the

Official Languages committee  It is a bit difficult, but there is some rather innovative work currently underway. The U.S., over the last few years, created what is referred to as the Literacy and Health in America Index. The International Adult Literacy Survey measures adult skills. It is a literacy test and

Official Languages committee  There is an ongoing debate, and a great deal of interests in regionalizing immigration. Most immigrants are concentrated in urban centres and they are being encouraged to move out into the regions. This has been going on now for 25 or 30 years. There have been successes, but ther

Official Languages committee  It is an important issue. A number of people, including the late Roger Bernard, have studied the development of a bilingual identity. This is an emerging trend in Quebec. More often now, when people are asked why they did not request services in French, they say that they are bil