Thank you, Madam Chair.
I'd like to thank all the committee members.
This issue is very important to me because of its ramifications in terms of Canada's linguistic duality, francophone post-secondary institutions in minority settings, and fair and equal access to education for francophones. In my opinion, all of these factors contribute to establishing Canada's role in building an inclusive society, both at home and abroad.
To give you a sense of the numbers at the Université de l'Ontario français (UOF), this year, our refusal rate for study permits was 65% to 70%. That includes the 30% of applications left unanswered.
In the vast majority of cases, the primary reason for refusal was that Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) is not convinced that the student will return to their country once they have completed their studies. To me, the primary reason for refusal raises the question of dual intent, but also judgment of intentions. Study permit applications are treated like immigration applications. This begs the question, are decisions based on immigration criteria, academic performance, or financial conditions being met?
If these applications are treated as immigration cases, then two reports by the Association des collèges et universités de la francophonie canadienne should been taken into account, because this has to do with strengthening the French fact in Canada. I can talk more about that in the question period. French-speaking Africa has the largest pool of francophones in the world, with 70% of francophones. All the studies confirm that. So we're talking about fairness with respect to linguistic duality considerations here.
The second most frequent reason for refusal is lack of financial guarantees. However, in most cases, applicants provide bank guarantees, shares or deeds, for example, and sometimes they pay part of their tuition fees upfront. There seems to be a disparity here in the criteria related to student provenance. Compared to students who come from China or India, French-speaking Africa is seen or perceived as a continent that yields poor students, so they are seen to represent a risk to Canadian society.
If immigration legislation has evolved, we have to wonder if the criteria for granting study permits contain traces of social, economic or racial exclusion factors, which were prevailing principles prior to 1967 in immigration legislation. So it's very important that we reflect on this issue.
I'd also like to point out a disparity to some extent in terms of the distribution of application processing centres. For example, all applicants from French-speaking sub-Saharan Africa are directed to the processing centre in Dakar. That centre serves a vast area that includes twenty-odd countries with very young populations. This inevitably results in bottlenecks, and it probably leads to biases in processing applications, as well as automatic refusals with no proper, consistent analysis of applications and significant processing delays. Statistics on the number of students granted study permits show that, even among French-speaking African countries, not everyone from any of those countries has the same chance of being accepted.