Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
I want to take this opportunity to thank my colleague Mr. Blois, from Nova Scotia, who has demonstrated how important the French language is, and who wanted to tell the committee his story as it relates with the motion and, obviously, the proposed amendment to the motion.
I want to point out that we announced the tabling of the official languages bill at the historic site of Grand-Pré, in my colleague's riding. You were there with me, Mr. Chair, when Bill C-13 on the modernization of the Official Languages Act was announced. We announced it in Grand-Pré. Mr. Blois is pleased to know that we're very proud of that riding.
The comments that he made in his speech were impressive. He had done his homework on the weekend. He edited his speech. He even edited the speech that he gave a week ago. He added information to enrich the committee's discussions. He also added other information, other facts, that are essential to the discussions we've been having in the past few weeks. I want to thank him for his work and his efforts to speak French. His French continues to improve, and that makes his teachers proud of their success, which is also his, as is often the case.
I would also like to note that all of us have been sitting on the Standing Committee on Official Languages for seven, eight or nine years. I sat on the committee in the first four years. Then I temporarily left the committee to take up other duties last year during the process to modernize the Official Languages Act. I have to say that was the high point of this committee's work.
The purpose of the amendment that I have introduced is to reach out to my opposition colleagues. I have asked them to look at themselves in the mirror, to stop playing their little games and to focus on the task at hand. Obviously, they've either failed to look at themselves in the mirror, or else the mirror is broken, because so far they have failed to change their attitude.
Having said that, I know that Mr. Dalton, Mr. Généreux, Ms. Kusie and Mr. Godin want to get to work. They want to keep moving the French language file forward and to build the foundation for Bill C-13. We have the tools we need; now we need to use them.
When the Commissioner of Official Languages appeared here in committee a week ago, he explained how important it is to get to work. He explained that we needed to set aside items such as these motions, which are now truly pointless.
A few weeks ago, I spoke out about Pierre Poilievre, who had used unacceptable language in a House of Commons. What happened? He refused to apologize. The word “wacko” that he used isn't the problem; it's the fact that he refused to withdraw his remarks or to apologize for using a word that isn't acceptable in the most democratic institution in Canada, as he was asked to do by the Speaker of the House of Commons, who is responsible for enforcing the rules in the House.
That man, who represents Ottawa's democratic institution, asked the leader to withdraw his remarks, but, as the latter refused to do so, he was ejected from the House. My colleague Francis Drouin has apologized seven times, if I'm not mistaken. It has become a political game.
Now with regard to my amendment, in it I requested that we move on to the next phase, that we extend an olive branch and that we bring this matter to an end.
I don't know about the other parties, but while we were studying Bill C-13, Canadian organizations and associations contacted my party almost every week to express their frustration. They're very frustrated now that they see we're pointlessly wasting minutes, hours and days. If the committee could agree to get down to business, we could get things done and achieve very important objectives.
Why did we pass Bill C-13 if we aren't going to use it? Nothing makes me feel prouder than the fact that we modernized the act, 35 years after it was last reformed. In an indirect way, it's the Conservatives who reformed it. It was actually Lucien Bouchard. If you read the Debates of the House of Commons from 1988, you'll see that he wasn't satisfied and that he felt that his party was limiting the benefits that the act afforded those communities. The act actually benefited those communities, but not as much as he would have liked. That's what led to the birth of the Bloc Québécois. The Bloc was founded because Conservatives weren't willing to move forward and give the act some teeth. If the Conservatives had been genuinely willing to support francophone communities outside Quebec, Mr. Bouchard would have stood down and gone about his business. He truly wanted to forge ahead, but it was too much for the Conservatives.
My memory may be a bit shaky here, but I think it was in 1982 that Mr. Dion established clear objectives regarding measures that would help support official language minority communities across Canada.
Today the organizations, which were so proud of all the MPs who had contributed to Bill C-13, feel that members don't want to move forward and implement the essential parts of the bill. How is that possible?
I can't cite a clearer example than Bill C-13, which, for the first time in Canada's history, acknowledges how important the education continuum is. This is the first time.
Consequently, this was an incredible opportunity for those community groups and associations. In the end, it's not just the primary level that will benefit from this, but, for the first time, the post-secondary and university levels will as well; Bill C-13 will help foster that. And the preschool level will benefit too. There has never been such an opportunity in the past. It's historic.
However, the Conservatives, and unfortunately the other opposition parties as well, don't actually want to implement Bill C-13. They don't want to let the post-secondary level conduct a study to ensure that programs and funding can meet existing needs and provide better service.
Then there's early childhood, which had no funding, no base and no driving force to help it along. I remember my father saying, in the 1960s, that if we had a bilingualism law, we could demand services because we'd have the necessary tools to do so. That was in 1969. The situation is exactly the same now, 63 years later.
We have Bill C-13, a tool with enormous potential that represents an opportunity to regain a lot of the ground that we have lost. But they aren't interested in that conversation. They don't want to look at themselves in the mirror. They don't want to look at their leader and tell him that enough's enough, that they were elected in their ridings to represent their people and that the people in their ridings want them to get to work, to conduct studies that will advance education, which—and I don't know how many times I've repeated this—is the key to a society's success. They don't want it. No, that isn't true. They want it, but they can't do it. They can't look their leader in the eye and say that they, the elected MPs, will control this issue, not him, and that we've already wasted enough time.
I don't understand how anyone can overlook opportunities to make major progress. It isn't as though opposition members don't consider the francophonie important. Everyone around this table thinks it's important, but biding our time to avoid implementing Bill C-13 is just another way for us to lose ground.
Lord knows the Conservatives have all the answers when they aren't in power. They do nothing to support francophone communities when they're in office. No one's in a better position than me to tell you that they cut funding. What funding will they cut if they ever get back in? They'll cut funding for minorities. It's what they do. You can't count on them when times are tough.
You know the analogy I always draw, don't you? Animals around a lake look at each other differently when the water level's low. That's exactly what's happening here. Minorities suffer when less money is on the table. And just as animals look at each other differently, people aren't treating each other as they used to do. It's unacceptable.
In the nine and a half years that Stephen Harper was in power, the Conservatives failed to allocate an additional penny of funding to the official languages in education program or the action plan for official languages. Not a single funding increase was granted in nine and a half years. Do you call that investing in the community and the francophonie? Is it progress? It's impossible. You know better than me that, if inflation rises by 2% a year, we'll be 20% behind 10 years later.
Look at the difference between the investments made by the Conservatives, who didn't increase funding for official language programs by a single cent, and those that the Liberals have made in eight and a half years. We've raised funding from $2.2 billion in 2015 to $4.1 billion; that's an increase of $1.9 billion. We've virtually doubled government investment in eight years, whereas the Conservatives never increased anything in nine years. So you know what will happen. As my colleague Mr. Serré said, and as we've often said in the House, the Conservatives will make cut after cut, especially in support for minorities. It's terrible.
The purpose of my amendment is to get us back to work. It's simply a matter of taking action. However, the Conservatives are opposed to it. They don't even want to look at it. They aren't interested in it because they want to continue playing political games. Which is unfortunate because I think that Bill C-13 was the high point of this committee's work and that what's happening now is its lowest. We're missing a favourable opportunity to improve the situation of minority preschool and post-secondary institutions.
Incidentally, I haven't even mentioned the francophone school boards, which, for the first time in Canada's history, became masters of their own destiny in the early 1990s. Before that, they reported to anglophone school boards. They couldn't operate on their own; they had to be guided. In the end, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that we were masters of our destiny in education. That's when we saw the number of francophone school boards increase right across Canada. In Nova Scotia, in 1996, we finally had an opportunity to establish a francophone school board that is now advancing and improving education in French.
Was that necessary? When I started out, I think there were 3,900 students, and now there are more than 6,000. Like the investments that have been made, the population has virtually doubled.
I remember that a former deputy minister of education in New Brunswick, whose name I forget, told me that he had read an article suggesting that, if the prevailing trend continued, no one would be speaking French in Nova Scotia in the 1960s. You can see the difference between then and now.
Why am I talking about that difference? I'm talking about it because we've had the Official Languages Act, the rise of francophone school boards across Canada, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982, the modernization of the Official Languages Act in 1988, and, lastly, we've passed Bill C-13, which now provides tools that we can use to move forward. We've even gone further by agreeing to review the act every 10 years. That will ensure that we move forward. I predict that we will lose ground if the Conservatives come into power.
I'm going to cite a few specific examples, including a very important one.
The first thing they'll do with regard to Bill C-13 is say they can't let us require that Supreme Court judges be bilingual. They oppose that now. They've voted against it. They're always against things and they will continue opposing things in future. They won't look at themselves in the mirror or insist that their leader enforce that requirement. This is very important, and that's why I anticipate the enormous loss they will cause.
Which other part of Bill C-13 will they withdraw? I don't know, but another way to undermine the bill would be not to fund it. As you've noticed, the bill provides for funding so it can evolve.
Even when my colleagues discuss Bill C-13, they say Treasury Board will take the necessary steps and ensure that everything's confirmed. However, if the Conservatives are elected, they will refuse to grant funding to Treasury Board, thus preventing it from doing its job. There will be no more responsibility, no more progress. We will lose ground. That's what troubles me.
Every week, Canada's school boards ask me to encourage the committee to begin studying them, the school boards. Earlier I told you that the boards were created in the early 1990s. So they were established 34 or 35 years ago, but they're facing problems today. You tend to notice problems over time. The boards now have an opportunity to talk to the people, the committee, the experts—
