I'd like to take the opportunity to talk about this subject. Indeed, I believe this is one of the harmful effects of the current action plan, an effect that I don't think is intentional. The wish was to make each of the departments accountable. So the money is distributed very widely.
It's entirely normal for organizations seeking to know where the money is for their needs and their organizations. This has created a certain amount of fragmentation. We see it. I sit on a lot of committees in Ottawa with all kinds of groups and organizations. I find that there's very little cooperation. The officers of the organizations before this committee may have a different point of view. I think it's quite obvious that this aspect of the plan somewhat forces communities to become one of the small enterprises trying to survive and keep what they have. I've even heard people use the term “neocorporatism”. People are looking for money, but aren't concerned with the total needs of the community. It's not because they don't want to, it's because they can't. There's no central agency to do the planning and to establish the plan's major priorities.
I started my presentation by talking about early childhood. Let's look at the funding allocated to early childhood compared to that earmarked for health. I don't want to compare funding, but early childhood is crucial. If half the children don't go to French schools, obviously, at the end of their lives, Francophone hospitals won't be of much use to them since they haven't first been able to live in French.
I think that's unfortunate because the action plan is lacking a communications plan. Do the rounds. Here you're mainly talking to organizations. Make some random calls and ask the public if they know there's a plan. I've previously made the following analogy. It's somewhat as though someone had wanted to plan a party for the community. The government organizes the party and works with the community. Through some form of horizontal governance, the community has taken part in organizing the party. A mid-term evaluation is conducted. An evaluation is done on how the party is being organized. But perhaps you have to realize that everyone forgot one important thing: the community wasn't invited to the party. No one was responsible for sending out invitations. The public doesn't know the action plan.
That's where our research becomes important. For example, when we conduct surveys of the parents of exogamous families—an Anglophone parent and a Francophone parent—they're asked what the best solution would be for their children to become bilingual. The vast majority of parents answer simply that it's half and half, that immersion or something similar is required. They forget that a society exists. They only think about school, an equal division of time between English and French will solve the problem. The term “social naiveté” has previously been used. That's what this is. They don't understand that, in a North American society where English is very strong, school has to compensate for that.
If there was a good communications plan, parents would know that the children of exogamous minority families who continue their education until grade 12 don't just become good bilingual students, but rather the best bilingual individuals in the country. Our research shows that they are equivalent to Francophones. Statistically, they can't be distinguished from Francophones who have two Francophone parents, and they are as good in English as Anglophones. So they're excellent bilinguals. However, parents still think that the best solution is half and half. They're not sociolinguists and they don't do research in the field. This sort of information should be known. The plan shouldn't simply exist. First, parents don't even know they have rights. A lot of people don't even know what it means when someone talks about section 23 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.