The largest city in the country will once again have an advisory committee for its Francophone community. On Wednesday evening, Toronto City Council voted to reappoint the committee for a four-year term, despite some questions from the community about its relevance.
Mayor John Tory’s team, which wanted the committee back, had been expecting for some time to get enough votes to pass the resolution. It was the mayor himself who chose the new chair of the committee, Dianne Saxe. The latter — the former environmental commissioner of Ontario — was elected to city council in October after being defeated in the June provincial election.
In interview with The duty last week, Mr.me Saxe claimed she agreed to be president because the mayor “asked her to.” “Someone has to do it,” she said. The counselor admits that she does not know much about issues affecting Francophones in Toronto. “So far, you know, these are environmental topics that I have deep experience in,” she says.
The committee has been inactive for the past four years. It only meets twice a year. Last March, a meeting was canceled because no item had been proposed on the agenda. Members of Toronto’s Francophone community questioned the relevance of the committee in December, when the mayor chose to delegate the responsibility of chairing the committee to Dianne Saxe. In 2019, the city’s executive committee reported that council members disagreed on the usefulness of the organization.
When asked if the committee still had a purpose, Dianne Saxe replied that “the mayor has decided that it is”. “It’s a matter of respect for rights,” she continued.
“We are a country created by collaboration between Francophones, Anglophones and Aboriginals. We have other much larger linguistic groups that do not have a committee, but the community is entitled to this gesture of respect because of its role [dans la fondation] of Canada,” explains the advisor.
This story is supported by the Local Journalism Initiative, funded by the Government of Canada.