The Fédération étudiante collégiale du Québec has more than 40,000 members in 19 CEGEPs located in more than ten different administrative regions of Quebec.
First of all, we would like to apologize for not providing you with a brief in advance. The fact is, we had trouble obtaining information about the cuts made by the government. Even yesterday, we were still waiting for someone to call us back to provide more information about the cuts, but unfortunately those calls never came, despite repeated requests for information from the Department of Human Resources. That is also the reason for our lack of information, to a certain extent, about programs that have been affected by budget cuts.
Other programs with respect to which we were unable to obtain any information are those dealing with literacy and learning. I won't mention all the programs about which we were given no information — that would not be useful — but at the same time, it is distressing to see that a month and a half after these cuts were announced, no information is yet available.
Indeed, we are concerned about the fact that we are being told, with respect to many of these programs, that these measures involve only targeting or administrative cuts, when in actual facts, these programs are losing more than 50 per cent of their budget. In our opinion, the result of these budget cuts will be to abolish these programs or, at the very least, seriously weaken them.
I will turn it over to my colleague to continue our presentation.