44th Parl. 1st Sess.
May 18, 2022 02:00PM
- May/18/22 2:46:00 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, he needs the Prince of Wales around in order to meet with business people and indigenous people? Okay then.
Meanwhile, he appoints people to represent the monarchy who do not speak French. He supports the Liberal MPs who are challenging Camille Laurin's and René Lévesque's Bill 101. He refuses to allow the Charter of the French Language to apply to federally regulated businesses.
In light of all that, is the Prime Minister preparing to launch a full-scale attack on the French language?
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- May/18/22 2:46:30 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, with our bill to modernize the Official Languages Act, we are not only strengthening protections for the French language, including within Quebec, but we are also doing something the Bloc Québécois could never do, and that is protecting the French fact all across the country.
We will continue to be there for francophone minorities who are facing enormous challenges. It is this Liberal government and the Liberal Party of Canada, not the Bloc Québécois, that will always be there to support and defend them and to invest in the future of French in Canada.
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Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague for his comments. His French is very good, by the way.
That was kind of the point of my speech, that we cannot rely solely on demographic data. I understand what he is saying. My riding, for example, is nearly 15,000 square kilometres. It is an immense territory. Yes, it will have roughly the same number of constituents as a Montreal riding that occupies three or four square blocks. However, there are special characteristics and different qualities that need to be taken into account. We must not rely on a mathematical calculation alone.
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Madam Speaker, as the ultimate bastion of the French language in North America, Quebec plays an important role in the structure of our society.
In the member's opinion, how important is Quebec's representation in the House to the survival of French in Quebec and Canada?
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Madam Speaker, it is nice to hear my colleagues speak French in the House. That is the point I wanted to make. Canada is bilingual, and that is more or less what we hear.
The mere fact that there are a lot of Bloc Québécois members in the House means that a lot more French is spoken. There are a lot more members who are defending the French language and who want to fight for its survival in Quebec and across Canada.
I think that significant representation like this could be very beneficial for the French language.
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Madam Speaker, if we allow Quebec's political weight to decline, there will be heightened vigilance. What is vigilance? Vigilance is keeping a close eye out to attenuate or avoid harm. We will have to be vigilant, especially with respect to the French language, culture and the economic Francophonie.
Last weekend, I participated in a meeting to evaluate the Assemblée parlementaire de la Francophonie's statutes. We had a chance to put some questions to a representative of the OECD, which is headquartered in Paris, and she told us about a set of principles on artificial intelligence. When we read the principles, I asked her who had done the work. She said that people from Egypt, Barcelona, anglophones and some people from Montreal, such as Mr. Bengio, had gone to Paris. I asked her what language people used to talk about the principles in Paris, and she said that the discussion took place in English. Imagine. All those people gathered in Paris, speaking English.
What was interesting was that you could see from reading the principles that the work was bilingual. I have nothing against the English language, but there is a thought process at work in the English language, just as there is a thought process at work in the French language. What I object to is the single mindset. If we are forced to operate more and more in English, we lose some of the thinking involved. Researchers who write and create in French and who translate their own thoughts lose out a little, but it is society as a whole that really loses out.
When I talk about being vigilant and maintaining our political weight, I am also talking about preserving a way of thinking, a capacity to create, a capacity to be different for the common good of all. The appointment of a Governor General who speaks only English and a similar situation in New Brunswick have been denounced in the House.
This also brings to mind the whole Julie Payette scandal from two years ago, when she was Governor General. I asked the Privy Council Office for a copy of the investigation report, but I was told, and I quote:
It is available only in English because that is the language it was written in.
That makes no sense. The report was later translated at my insistence, since it was only available in English. I am not saying that it was conceived in English, but that it was not available in French. I can read English, but this was unacceptable.
It is because of things like this that I talk about vigilance, about monitoring, in order to avoid or mitigate harm. Bill C‑14 does not meet Quebec's demands. With this bill, we do not lose seats, but we begin to disintegrate. At some point, we will assimilate and disappear. What will we be able to say once we have lost our voice? The answer is nothing.
Before we reach the point where we are able to do nothing more than wave in the hope that some benevolent soul offers help, we must act and we must resist. For Quebec, Bill C‑14 is a call to resistance, a call to not give in to uniformity of thought in terms of tastes, ideas, and existence. Fernando Pessoa once said that to die is to slip out of view. With Bill C‑14, Quebec slips out of view.
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