On the occasion of the Paris Book Festival, whose guest is Quebec, French Minister of Culture Rachida Dati announced the creation of a joint France-Quebec committee intended to combat the lack of visibility of works on the Internet and sites in French. Earlier, during a meeting at the Ministry of Culture, rue de Valois, Rachida Dati and her Quebec counterpart Mathieu Lacombe had both agreed on this act in order to urgently tackle this problem which makes works in French more difficult to spot in the jungle of the web.
The announcement was not expected to be made this Thursday, as the press release was not yet ready. But that was without taking into account the unpredictable French Minister of Culture who, to the great surprise of the Quebec delegation, could not refrain from stealing the spotlight from his counterpart and revealing the news in his speech. inauguration of the Book Festival.
Concretely, this working group chaired by the two ministers, says Mathieu Lacombe, aims to “put additional political weight” in order to include in the Convention on the Diversity of Cultural Expressions of UNESCO a section on digital technology, where is today broadcast the majority of cultural works.
“The creation of this committee is part of the final sprint of our international action” which aims to modify the UNESCO convention to include digital technology, explains Mr. Lacombe. The minister is hopeful of achieving this within about a year. It is also in Quebec that the UNESCO working group will meet next May, which must formulate its recommendations by December. “Quebec is recognized abroad as a leader in this field,” he said.
Mathieu Lacombe does not hide his hope that the Francophonie Summit which will be held in France, in Villers-Cotterêts, next October will address the issue and discuss it in its final press release. From next December, the countries which left the Convention will have to form an idea before their meeting in June 2025 where the proposal could be adopted. “This fight is not only a fight for French, it is a fight for all minority cultures,” explains the minister.
Better access to French-speaking cultural content?
The issue of “discoverability” is a battle led for a long time by the former Minister of Culture and International Relations of Quebec, Louise Beaudoin. On January 31, she presented a report to the government entitled The cultural sovereignty of Quebec in the digital age proposing 32 recommendations to protect and promote French-speaking cultural content on the web.
Experts, including Véronique Guèvremont and Patrick Taillon, from Laval University, as well as the former administrator of the International Organization of La Francophonie Clément Duhaime, suggested in particular that Quebec legislate to guarantee the right to better access to cultural content French-speaking. “We are working on a law. But this is complicated, because it would involve a modification of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms,” said the minister.
In the past, joint France-Quebec working groups have not been useless. It was one of them, created by prime ministers Lionel Jospin and Lucien Bouchard in 1998, which led to the adoption, first by the International Organization of La Francophonie then by UNESCO, of the Convention on the Diversity of Cultural Expressions still in force today.