Right now, our greatest challenge is to provide adequate support to our community school centres because they're really the developmental core of our communities. Our regions are so isolated and we don't have the critical mass, as a result of which it's impossible for these centres to become self-sufficient, to be business entities, if you will.
Since the centres were developed, we've been trying to become more efficient. We've conducted a number of restructuring and redevelopment exercises. A human resources redeployment process is currently under way to increase our efficiency and to see if there wouldn't be a better way to do things. Here again, we can't balance our budgets. Funding is distinctly inadequate: heating costs are rising, we can't offer competitive salaries, and we have enormous staff turnover. The people in place have made an extraordinary commitment, but, if we can't be competitive, those people will go to work for the provincial or federal government. We're a training centre for the governments, and we do a good job because they're always pleased to have them.
That's our major challenge. First we need adequate facilities. Not all centres can be called “community school centres”. In the leased spaces, there are only classrooms; there isn't even a gymnasium or music room or theatre. It's very hard to be self-sufficient when you don't have facilities to provide adequate services.
Furthermore, we can always try to supplement our budgets and sell our services. Sometimes we're not carrying out our mandate. We can't reach our clientele when we want, since we have to put on Anglophone shows and Anglophone groups use our facilities so that we can pay the bills.
That, to a large degree, is our biggest challenge right now. Human resources, facilities and financial resources can't meet current needs. The other side of the coin is that the creation of these schools and centres is probably our biggest success. And we see it spreading. We are recovering a lost generation, and even two generations in certain regions.
In Souris and Rustico, for example, we owe the survival of the language to grandparents and, in some instances, great-grandparents, who are Acadians, because Francophones have not had the opportunity for a number of generations to be educated in French. But these people are proud. We see it in their faces, just as we see it in the communities. They register their children in French schools without knowing a single word of French, but that's what they want for their children. They take French courses so that they can have conversations with their children in French.
All that gives visibility to a community that has linguistic duality. All this belongs to us as Canadians. In Prince Edward Island, we're transmitting it in an incredible manner. That's our greatest pleasure. Our greatest pleasure is also to go into a region where you don't expect to have a meeting in French and suddenly to meet a parents committee in which 12 parents try to speak a language they scarcely know in order to communicate with us. They show us that they're proud, that, even though it's unfortunate that they didn't have a chance to go to a French school, they don't want to lose another generation. So these parents enrol their children in a school that's completely inadequate, when, just opposite, or nearly opposite, another school has everything, but is virtually empty because of declining birth rates.