An Act for the Substantive Equality of Canada's Official Languages
Date: 2023_04_26
Chamber: HOUSE OF COMMONS
Mr. Jacques Gourde: it is a pleasure for me to rise in the House to speak to Bill C-13 , an act to amend the Official Languages Act, to enact the use of French in federally regulated private businesses act and to make related amendments to other acts. If I wanted to sum up the clause-by-clause study of this bill in committee, I would say that this bill is like the mountain that laboured and brought forth a mouse. Modernizing the Official Languages Act was 50 years overdue, much like EI reform, which is still long overdue. We worked on this bill for a full year at the Standing Committee on Official Languages, and now we are finally at report stage, with additional amendments and yet another one of the Prime Minister 's broken promises. Should we be surprised? Making promises and not keeping them seems to be in the air in the spring of 2023 for this Prime Minister. Thousands of people across the country are extremely disappointed right now, and for a variety of reasons. Whether we take the Prime Minister at his word or believe he has been caught red-handed, his Liberal incompetence is pervasive throughout the machinery of government, and Bill C-13 is no exception. We could hardly manage after all the delays caused by the pandemic, which was blamed for many things. I am thinking of passport delays, immigration, foreign workers and the labour shortage. Now the public service is on strike even though the Prime Minister had promised that it would not have to happen. In the middle of tax season and tax refunds, hard-pressed families waiting for their money will have to patiently put up with one more thing. I like to be optimistic, but I am also a realist. With this Prime Minister , we can never say, "promise made, promise kept". For eight years, the Prime Minister has been perfecting the drama skills he learned at school, but it is sad to see that it has made him a man of all talk and no action. The last thing Canadians needed was a Prime Minister who wears rose-coloured glasses like his Minister of Finance , who does not know how to count given that she is spending $43 billion more than what we have. This Prime Minister does not keep his promises and is eroding the French fact. We have a Prime Minister who is good at speaking in both official languages and sweet-talking people at election time, but it is a whole different ball game when it comes to getting real results in any area. I have to say that we are losing that ball game, and badly. We have also lost precious time and money. Committed, well-meaning people have now become disillusioned. We are also seeing another disastrous consequence for thousands of French Canadians living in minority communities. I am talking about the decline of French. What I find the saddest is that, when faced with a Parliament that skimps on pretty much everything that Canadians care about the most, even the most steadfast individuals, those who have defended our country with strong, deeply-held convictions, have run out of steam and they no longer have the energy to fight the monster created by the Liberal Party of Canada: a country that is in social, cultural and economic decline. We are now trapped in a country led by a pair of scheming, illegitimate political parties, where a laissez-faire ideology and reckless spending are the orders of the day and where fine words are never followed by concrete and sustainable action for a better future or any kind of future at all for that matter. Providing hope for far too long only to produce mediocre results is what the Liberal Party of Canada has done yet again with Bill C-13 . In its priorities, legalizing drugs was the top priority, as was giving criminals lighter sentences. For months, if not years, we have been dealing with a flagrant lack of will and lack of meaningful actions. They are not making any real substantive changes, including when it comes to today's debate on modernizing Canada's Official Languages Act. Both the community and the Conservative Party of Canada are unanimous: Bill C-13 does not meet the objective of offering solutions to the problems regarding French as the language of work and as the language used in society. As a diligent legislator, and I know what I am talking about because I worked on the amendments to Bill C-13 in committee, and a concerned citizen who cares about promoting French, I read the disparaging newspaper articles about the Prime Minister, the Liberal Party and their desire to protect French in Canada. As a member of Parliament for the people of Levis-Lotbiniere, who I proudly represent in my mother tongue, French, I would like to bring to the attention of all members two proposed amendments to Bill C-13. Motion No. 9 adds an obligation in the English version. It states: The Minister of Canadian Heritage shall advance the equality of status... In contrast, the French version is weaker. We would like to see a way to ensure that the two texts are consistent, so that the French version reflects the English version with that obligation. I also want to draw my colleagues' attention to Motion No. 13. This motion does not put Canada's two official languages, English and French, on an equal footing. The Conservative Party of Canada supports bilingualism in Canada and equality of status. We can and must protect and promote French in a way that does not take away from the English language. As we know, Bill C-13 is a failed attempt by the NDP-Liberal Party coalition to make us believe that bilingualism is being adequately protected in Canada. However, the Standing Committee on Official Languages did not listen carefully to a very large majority of the amendments called for by the Federation des communautes francophones et acadienne du Canada and the Commissioner of Official Languages. Their amendments are not included in Bill C-13. After eight years of talk about protecting the French language, it is safe to say that this bill is nothing but smoke and mirrors and does not guarantee that the French language is going to flourish in the future. The objectives should have been to stop the decline of French and to protect and promote both official languages, but Bill C-13 achieves neither of those very laudable goals. The Treasury Board should be the central agency for coordinating the implementation of the Official Languages Act. To ensure this coordination, the powers of the Treasury Board should have been extended to the entire act. The Treasury Board's powers in part VIII have not been extended to the entire act, not even to part VII. This is completely inconsistent, since all stakeholders were calling for the Treasury Board to become the central agency and to be given the tools to do so. I would also like to call attention to another flaw in the bill. The current wording of the bill does not ensure that all children of rights holders will continue to be counted under section 23 of the Charter. It merely sets out a commitment to estimate the number of rights holders. There is no obligation to include these questions in the census, as they were in the 2021 census, which will lead to an underestimation of the number of children of rights holders. Let us now look at how the legislation will be reviewed, since the Conservative Party of Canada proposed that a five-year review be conducted. Given the accelerating decline of French in Canada, this amendment could have provided an additional tool to react quickly and recalibrate. As for the powers of the Commissioner of Official Languages, they were completely ignored. His order-making powers should have been extended to part VII of the act to enable him to do his job properly. We worked hard, but in vain, to move amendments required to strengthen part VII. We needed to add obligations to ensure that federal institutions take the positive measures needed to protect and promote both official languages. I will close by addressing an issue that is at the heart of this bill, the definition of francophone minorities. The bill should have included an explicit definition of the term "francophone minority" so that it would continue to refer only to minority francophone communities outside Quebec and thus avoid any interpretation by the courts. In conclusion, this is once again a failed attempt in the history of Canada to protect and promote the French language. It is an example of the disastrous legacy of the Liberal Party of Canada and of the Prime Minister , who really is not interested in what Canadians across the country really care about.