Official Languages committee  Can I be the first to answer?

Official Languages committee  Okay. Some newspapers recently published interesting data. I am thinking in particular of an article from the newspaper Le Devoir in November. The article said that people who came to study French in Quebec were discriminated against. In fact, the federal refusal rate for them was higher than for people from the same countries who wanted to come to Canada to study in English.

Official Languages committee  Can the committee make recommendations to the Department of Citizenship and Immigration?

Official Languages committee  I believe that the committee should demand answers from the Department of Citizenship and Immigration about the treatment of francophones. The committee should ask the department why the refusal rate is so high.

Official Languages committee  I am not an expert on the federal public service in Quebec, but from what I've heard, English is the language of work used most often, which ought not to be the case in Quebec. For many francophones, the freedom to choose their language of work in the federal public service in Quebec is an illusion.

Official Languages committee  I think that companies can already choose whether or not to comply with the Charter of the French Language. In my view, the problem is that it's a option. Bill 101 should apply to federally regulated undertakings, period. It shouldn't be a matter of choice.

Official Languages committee  We rounded the 8% to 10%. Strictly speaking, the figures should be 92% and 8%.

Official Languages committee  Currently, grant programs are based on criteria for excellence, meaning that they are based on [Editor's Note: Technical difficulty]. There's a historical effect there, to the effect that those who were good in the past are good today. The disproportion, in my view, increases over time.

Official Languages committee  Institutional completeness is a concept that was invented by Raymond Breton, a sociologist at the University of Toronto. He had found that the vitality of a community's language was tied to the breadth of its institutional network. If this concept is applied to francophones outside Quebec, the fact that they have few French language high schools and almost no French language universities—apart from in Moncton—has a very negative impact on their vitality.

Official Languages committee  Postsecondary programs for francophones outside Quebec are seriously underfunded in all Canadian provinces. Current investment represents only a fraction of the money that should be invested in them. The situation is reversed in Quebec, where English-language universities and cégeps receive two or three times more funding based on the anglophone community's demographic weight.

Official Languages committee  Good afternoon. An unusual linguistic dynamic has taken shape in Quebec in the past 15 years or so. Since 1871, the demographic weight of francophones in Quebec had never fallen below 80%. Now it is 78%, having declined 3.4 percentage points in 15 years, a record. It is also falling quickly with regard to the language spoken in the home.

Official Languages committee  I would like to make two recommendations. The discrimination that the federal Department of Citizenship and Immigration has shown toward francophone immigrants undermines Quebec's efforts to attract francophone and francotrope immigrants who will integrate well into French-speaking Quebec.

Official Languages committee  English-language universities are on the rise in Montreal and occupy nearly half the institutional space there. Federal funding is one of the keys to the rise of McGill University, and Concordia University, in particular. Those two institutions will attract increasing numbers of students, and their funding applications are enormously successful.

Official Languages committee  I think you have to take that into consideration.

Official Languages committee  Yes, as I wrote in my book, we should have introduced an asymmetrical official languages act. Asymmetry means acknowledging that there is only one real majority in Canada: the anglophone majority. Francophones form a false majority, even in Quebec. The sociological reality is this: francophones are unable to completely assimilate immigrants who settle in Quebec.