As regards the Court Challenges Program, our relations with our provincial government have been the most critical for us.
As I said earlier, I don't think that there's a lack of will most of the time. Our provincial government lacks resources to meet its educational obligations towards its Francophone minority. If the federal government and our provincial government formed a more solid partnership, so that our government could have the necessary funding to meet the needs of our communities, I'm pretty sure it would meet its obligations in this area.
Our minister said it at the ministerial conference. It's thanks to the Court Challenges Program that Prince Edward Island was able to get its schools. That's the way the funding goes when you're dealing with a major deficit: it's hard to make a decision involving large amounts of money for a minority. It's hard for a government in a deficit situation.
Furthermore, that's also transposed to our next plan, regarding the Court Challenges Program, which was more focused on early childhood services. In Prince Edward Island, early childhood services are viewed more as part of the private domain. That's quite true for Anglophones, who enjoy a broad variety of services. It's a fairly lucrative business for Anglophones. However, for Francophones, it's harder to recruit human resources, and material resources are much more costly. In addition, since there's only one centre per region and our population is smaller, our services are aimed exclusively at the elites. And that's not really what we want; we want the service to be accessible to everyone.
Twelve hundred dollars a year doesn't necessarily promote access to this service, particularly when people have to travel an extra hour to drop their children off at Francophone day care centres.
In our view, a greater commitment by the federal government toward the provincial government would definitely be an asset that would fill the void created by the cancellation of the Court Challenges Program.