CNOLC-newsletter-no3/initiatives

COMMUNITY INITIATIVES AT A GLANCE

This vignette, prepared in partnership with Canadian Heritage, highlights some initiatives carried out by federal institutions in official language minority communities (OLMCs) across the country. In this issue, a few of the initiatives we describe are from Positive measures related to minority media, prepared by Canadian Heritage.


MINORITY MEDIA

In Gros Morne National Park in Newfoundland and Labrador, Parks Canada collaborated with the Voice of Bonne Bay Community Radio on a series of French-language radio vignettes on the park’s ecological and cultural heritage. Those vignettes provided members of the Francophone community and visitors to the region with information about Gros Morne in their official language on local community radio.

The Office of the Chief Science Officer of the Public Health Agency of Canada funded an issue of a children’s science magazine, Sciences Mag Junior, with La Liberté, Manitoba’s only French-language newspaper. The initiative was designed to raise awareness of COVID-19 in the 6-to-12-year age group.

Although the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission’s job is to oversee radio broadcasting, it is supporting Quebec’s Indigenous communities by approving a request to continue serving the English-speaking and Mohawk communities of Kanesatake/Oka on the air.

The Canadian Impact Assessment Agency has prepared about 30 media plans for projects across the country. All of them included advertising in minority language media.

The Canadian Security Intelligence Service’s Academic Outreach and Stakeholder Engagement program produces a bi-monthly open-source publication entitled “Need to Know,” which is distributed to stakeholders across Canada and around the world. The publication includes primary sources and events, some in English and some in French, to inform the official language communities of the views and sources available in either of the official languages.

For more examples of positive measures related to minority media, please see this document prepared by Canadian Heritage. If you would like to share a best practice established by your organization, contact the Council’s secretariat.