A small group of Francophones gathered at Barrie’s city hall on Monday afternoon reading out loud their manifesto of demands aimed at the Ford government.
The French community said two main issues need to be addressed.
The first is the government’s decision to scrap the position of the French Language Services Commissioner, and instead pile those duties onto the plate of the ombudsman.
“The commissioner was doing a lot more than receiving complaints and putting reports together,” explains Carol Jolin, L'Assemblée de la francophonie de l'Ontario President. “He was looking forward. He was looking, in terms of French services, at what was needed for the province.”
The second issue is the untimely freezing of provincial funding for a proposed French-language university.
“We have an offer from the federal government to finance the first four years of that project and to finance half of that project. So I think it’s a win-win situation,” Jolin says.
The group plans to schedule a meeting with the Minister of Francophone Affairs, who they have been in constant contact with to this point.
