You've touched on some very interesting questions. First of all, the Quebec Community Groups Network is an umbrella group. As Bob has just indicated, we ensure that our members get together several times a year. We don't think we get together often enough. If you want to know why we don't, it's very simple economics. When you bring in somebody from the St. Lawrence north shore and the Magdalen Islands to meet with somebody from the Outaouais and Montreal, it costs about $50,000 a meeting. We don't have the resources to do that very often.
We've just talked about the community learning centres. Part of that program, as you are probably aware, involves equipping those 15 centres with videoconferencing facilities, which are pretty scarce in most of our regions. We are hoping that as that network grows we may be able to have a higher level of face-to-face videoconferencing opportunities in the future.
The fact of the matter is that a great many of our communities are connected by fibre optic broadband facilities--not everywhere. Our school system has had significant encouragement and some support from the province to implement that program, so where we have English schools we have broadband access, for the most part. That means it is feasible to set up videoconferencing centres.
Fifteen centres across the province won't cut it to get our members together, but it's a start. If that program can grow, we may look at a future in which we can talk on a regular basis and share successes, information, programs, and all the good things that happen when we network.
When we ask people what is the greatest value of having a meeting and getting together, my experience over the last 30 years in the community tells me that it's very consistently the opportunity to network with colleagues who are interested in the same thing. That's where we really learn how a problem we're facing was solved and what approach to try. We wouldn't have known about it if we hadn't met one of our colleagues at a meeting who told us what they did and how well it worked. So networking is tremendously important.