Official Languages Committee on Oct. 31st, 2006

[Pierre Lemieux, Conservative, Glengarry—Prescott—Russell, ON]

Good morning. Thank you for coming.

As far as the CNFS is concerned, the results you presented are positive in many ways. This message was also delivered last week by Mrs. Lortie from La Cité collégiale. As a member of Parliament, I am truly pleased that our government is involved in the CNFS and that federal funding is directly helping to train health professionals.

You spoke of significant challenges. You also said you needed to begin the next phase in order to overcome these challenges, but you were not very specific. Could you specify what these challenges or other priorities are and what you intend to do to overcome them?

[Gilles Patry]

Thank you Mr. Lemieux for asking this excellent question. This is an important question at this stage of the project.

Phase II of the project extends from 2003 to 2008. You might think that 2008 is in two years, but that is not so. April 2008 is in a few months. We absolutely must get a sign from the government in the coming months to know where we are going at the CNFS.

The 10 member institutions of the CNFS have already committed funding and accepted students, who are now in the middle of training, and that will continue. That is why we see this as an essentially permanent Health Canada program.

Phase I of the CNFS went from 1999 to 2003 and Phase II goes from 2003 to 2008. Phase III has different objectives. The first objective is to continue training and to expand on the training capacity of the existing programs, to evaluate these programs and to refocus our target, if necessary, to make it right. We can target and expand the training of front-line health professionals, those who interact directly with patients. It is at this level that the issue of language is so important. We have to train surgeons, but when a person is asleep, they do not necessarily have direct contact with the surgeon. We have to target front-line professionals: family medicine, nursing, physiotherapy, occupational therapy and so forth.

It is important to get a quick sign from the government for Phase III because there are other aspects. The second aspect we might have to improve is professional training. A number of Francophones in minority regions, for example nurses or doctors, who were trained within the framework of the CNFS 5, 10 or 15 years ago now want to upgrade their training and have professional training. What will they do?

In a minority situation, people are trained in English for upgraded and professional training. What we want to do during the course of Phase III is offer these people additional, professional and upgraded training.

Another very important aspect that also targets federal government priorities is the issue of new immigrants. We have to be able to welcome and monitor throughout the process new immigrants who already have training in health care. If they receive nursing training in a country other than Canada and the professional orders do not recognize them directly, we have to be able to give them complementary training to make them active as soon as possible in their Francophone minority area. This objective is part of Phase III, but we are already working on it in Phase II. We would like year end funding to contribute to better launching this initiative.

[The Chair, Conservative, Guy Lauzon]

Mr. Patry I am afraid that your time is already up.

I call on Mrs. Barbot to ask the next question.

[Vivian Barbot, Bloc, Papineau, QC]

I would simply like to come back to what you said previously on the evaluation by Mr. LeBlanc and Mr. Bisson. According to our information, these men were management consultants for agencies close to the CNFS. There is no need to come back to the matter, but I simply wanted to point that out.

I totally agree with the objectives you are pursuing. I think the program must continue because it is only in the long term that we will be able to correct, in a permanent manner, a situation that is quite dramatic for Francophones outside Quebec. However, I have the following question. Health is a provincial jurisdiction. Does having these programs, which bring about a surplus of students, not end up relieving provincial governments from their responsibilities for training their Francophone citizens? In other words, have you made a link between the number of students you would have trained in French in the beginning to the portion that has been added? Is there not a shift in this sense?

[Gilles Patry]

That is an excellent question that we get quite regularly. I have a two-part answer to that question. I will give you the example of the University of Ottawa, which is an institution that represents many.

I think it would be difficult to ask the provincial Government of Ontario to train nurses, doctors, occupational therapists or physiotherapists to meet the needs of Alberta, British Columbia, Saskatchewan, Manitoba or New Brunswick. I would have a hard time approaching the Minister, Mr. Bentley, to ask him to grant $2 million to the University of Ottawa to help train minority Francophones in Alberta and New Brunswick. I would have a hard time doing that. I think this is entirely the responsibility of the federal government.

[Vivian Barbot, Bloc, Papineau, QC]

I do not have a problem with what you just said, but what about the Franco-Ontarian students?

[Gilles Patry]

The University of Ottawa, during the first two phases of the CNFS project, did not accept any Franco-Ontarian students because it received limited funding directly from the Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities for its programs to meet Ontario's needs. I can assure you of that. This was already planned by the University of Ottawa

However, I told you that in the third phase, this might be slightly different. We would like to increase this capacity and test the models to ensure that our Franco-Ontarians, who come to the University of Ottawa within the framework of the CNFS through Windsor, the Niagara region, Toronto, etc., can go back to their home region. I would like to come back to our immersion program later because it is also quite interesting. In the case of a Franco-Ontarian studying at the University of Ottawa, but not within the framework of the CNFS, no effort is made to organize training placements for that student in Windsor, northern Ontario or in Niagara. Nonetheless, I think that the federal government has a duty to serve all these minority communities, to fund the University of Ottawa, the Cité collégiale, the Boreal College, these four member institutions of the CNFS, so that we can make an additional effort to encourage these students to go back to their home region. That is where the CNFS plays an important role. In this context, this becomes a federal responsibility.

[The Chair, Conservative, Guy Lauzon]

Times flies when we are talking about interesting things.

Mr. Godin, you have the floor.

[Yvon Godin, NDP, Acadie—Bathurst, NB]

Thank you Mr. Chairman. I will try to keep the debate interesting to make time fly.

Let us look at the New Brunswick example. The province decided to pay to allow a certain number of people to take a program in medicine. How many people are required to take the initiative to come here? I know someone who had been wanting to go to university for years. He tried at Sherbrooke, but there was no room. Finally he found a spot in Ottawa. What can you do? If he became a citizen of Ontario to get in, will he be sent back to our region?

[Gilles Patry]

That is an excellent question.

[Yvon Godin, NDP, Acadie—Bathurst, NB]

It is an excellent question, but quite the problem.

[Gilles Patry]

You raised two points. The first had to do with student recruitment. How do we inform students about the CNFS and how do we facilitate their acceptance in the 10 CNFS institutions?

Training and recruitment are two of the four pillars of the CNFS, which does a lot of recruitment work. I am very pleased that you gave me the example of this student of medicine who attended the University of Ottawa, because last night—

[Yvon Godin, NDP, Acadie—Bathurst, NB]

Excuse me, but he lost a few years to get to that point.

[Gilles Patry]

Yes, but at least he found a spot somewhere.

Last night I went to the CNFS Web site just for fun because I knew you would ask me difficult questions. I asked myself the following question: if I were a student somewhere in Canada, how could find a place in an educational institution?

The CNFS Web site lists all the health professions and allows students to access the programs directly. It has special page for CNFS students. When someone decides to apply to the medicine program at the University of Ottawa, for example, or nursing at the Collège universitaire de Saint-Boniface, they go through a special CNFS process. Their application is flagged and receives preferential review within the framework of the CNFS. Our institutions reserve spots for CNFS students.

I will now answer your second question. We try to allow our students of medicine to do four weeks of rotations at a hospital in their home region. The result is not always guaranteed, but that is what we always try to do. We pay for their travel and accommodation expenses when they do not stay with their family or another person. The CNFS covers these additional costs in order to encourage them to go to the Moncton hospital, for example, or to another hospital.

[Yvon Godin, NDP, Acadie—Bathurst, NB]

It just closed.

[Gilles Patry]

That is a bad example. They can go to a regional hospital and go back— The student makes their own contacts. The Société Santé en français has a responsibility as far as the acceptance of these students is concerned, but the hospitals also have a responsibility.

Mr. Murphy spoke of the importance of ensuring that these people get gainful employment. The regions have to be competitive and tell newly trained doctors that if they come back to their home region they will receive such and such advantage.

In order to retain these students in the regions, the CNFS has even considered an assistance program—and the government could consider this route—for graduates who return to their home region. Under this program, we could, for example, relieve part or all of their student debt if they spend five years or more in the region.

We know full well that when students go back to their region, they are at an age when they want to get married and settle down. They become less mobile and they stay in the regions. I think that the regions also have an interest and a responsibility in this.

[The Chair, Conservative, Guy Lauzon]

Thank you Mr. Patry. That was very interesting, but time is up already.

We will start the third round with Mr. D'Amours.

[Jean-Claude D'Amours, Liberal, Madawaska—Restigouche, NB]

Thank you Mr. Chairman.

I will pursue the earlier discussion a little, but by addressing another aspect. One of the campuses in my riding, the New Brunswick Community College in Campbellton, now offers—last year I announced the official opening of the centre and it is mentioned in the one of the documents—a radiology techniques program, among others. This was a first in New Brunswick, and what is more, it was in a Francophone area. I lift my hat to my predecessor, who worked very hard to achieve this project. These are concrete examples of how we can find the means on the campuses, at a university or at a community college, to train people in health care.

You made a comment earlier, Mr. Patry that I would like to come back to. It was about funding or the financing agreement that ends in 2008. As you said so well: 2008 is around the corner. We do not need to wait until 2008 to start talking about how we can improve things or about plans for the future. Official language minority communities are turning to the future and not the past, as the Minister responsible for La Francophonie and Official Languages said a few weeks ago.

Mr. Patry, I would like to know where things stand on the discussions with the federal government for renewing this agreement. I know there are members of the government sitting across from us, but do you feel there is a will to resolve this quickly without having to wait until 2008?

[Gilles Patry]

Firstly, we are already preparing the document. The document for Phase II is taking shape; it is already ready. To give you an idea of our sense of responsibility, I would say to you that all the institutions have each prepared a document. We are in the process of putting one document together. We will send three independent CNFS experts—I am coming back to this concept of CNFS's independence—specialists in health, who will evaluate our document in a critical manner. Not everyone will be pleased with the results and subsequent recommendations, but we want to make sure we have a document that will be ready to be submitted to the government as early as April or March 2007. This document is ready. We are just putting the finishing touches on it.

You spoke earlier about new programs and the Campbellton campus. I will give you an example of a new program we are currently reviewing, but we are not sure it will be included in Phase III. My colleague, the President of the Université de Moncton, Yvon Fontaine, and myself, are looking at the possibility of offering a joint program of study in pharmacy in French. Such a program does not exist where you come from nor in Ontario either. What we currently have to do is buy spots for our students in universities in Quebec. We are looking at the possibility of implementing this program during Phase III. For now this project is still not part of Phase III because it is very expensive. But two major educational institutions have agreed to work together on an innovative project to offer a joint Ottawa-Moncton program in pharmacy in French. We are looking into this and we will see what happens.

[Jean-Claude D'Amours, Liberal, Madawaska—Restigouche, NB]

Mr. Patry, you said it is very expensive. I agree. That is always the problem in remote regions, but at the end of the day, this would allow more of our students living in minority communities, in rural regions, to study in their own region and then work there. This is one of our major difficulties: young people leave home to study in major cities and then the challenge is to bring them back home.

[Gilles Patry]

Absolutely.

[Jean-Claude D'Amours, Liberal, Madawaska—Restigouche, NB]

If we are able to give them the necessary tools, the necessary training in the rural regions, especially in their language, they are much more encouraged to stay. There have been a number of discussions in the past few weeks with different people from the health profession and the number one challenge is still to figure out how to attract health professionals to the rural regions and then the second challenge is how to keep them there. It is always a challenge.

[Gilles Patry]

And that, as I was saying, is at the very heart of the CNFS mission. I hope to be able to answer your question quickly. It is not that we want to establish faculties of medicine everywhere. I do not want to give that impression. However, this is the solution CNFS proposes: yes, we can perhaps enroll students in Moncton or at the University of Ottawa, but then we should be able to ensure that placements, that are important and lengthy, are done in the regions and that there are summer jobs available. In my opinion, this would be a winning solution. The goal is not to implement programs in small communities, even if each community would like to have its own faculty of medicine or faculty of health sciences, but to equip these regions and then send students back to clinical settings—

[The Chair, Conservative, Guy Lauzon]

Excuse me, Mr. Patry, time has run out.

Mrs. Barbot will ask the next question.

[Vivian Barbot, Bloc, Papineau, QC]

I would like to hear you say a few words about any bias there might be in this training. I spoke to you earlier about shifting responsibilities between the provincial and federal governments. Your response was quite convincing.

You also talked about programs delivered by videoconferencing, for example. We know full well that not every student can learn that way. Have you thought about that? Even if this training is offered, we have to make sure there is access to more traditional training.

Furthermore, you spoke of retaining students in or having them come back to their home regions. This is a major problem that a number of provinces, Quebec in particular, have difficulty resolving.

Do you not think that something in favour of these students could come from education? This could be a type of social training to help them become aware of their impact when they leave their home region.

Sometimes I have the impression, having been an immigrant myself once, that what is missing is not the means to practice in the home region; it is more than that. Beyond that, it is a form of social citizenship that would make these students feel a bit responsible. Has there been any such dialogue within the framework of this program?