It requires a sustained effort. What we're going through in health, we have already gone through in education.
First, you have to make people aware how important it is to demand service in French. The problem in Alberta is not like the problem in Manitoba. Since I'm a former Manitoban, I'm quite familiar with the situation. In Alberta, because we are very dispersed, we deal with nine different boards of health. So it's up to each community to stand up for its rights and needs with the regional board of health.
Earlier, I said that if these boards of health were funded to provide care and service, that would help us, particularly if that funding came from the Government of Canada. It would be important for part of that funding to be specifically earmarked to help the local population get more care and service in French.
It's not easy to mobilize people. As was mentioned earlier, there have been French-language schools in Alberta for around 20 years, and only 15% of eligible students attend those schools. We have some work to do to attract the remaining 85%.
So we need help to raise awareness, to get young people interested in working in the field of health and to create our treatment centres.
This afternoon, you will see a fledgling treatment centre. It's a temporary clinic set up with federal assistance. We have to admit we got $700,000 to establish this clinic. That signal was important in our negotiations with the board of health. They suddenly realized there were francophones in Edmonton and that they had needs. The federal government was aware of that too. So they've started providing us with tools. They started to react. The board of health and the public reacted. We began to examine those services. That's how we managed to mobilize people.
It's the chicken and the egg. We think we have the egg, and with it, we will have several chickens. The chickens are the centres we are going to create across the province. We're starting with one centre. It's the same phenomenon as with the schools. We started with one school and now there are over 20. In 10 years, maybe the province will have four or five health centres, where francophone communities are strong enough to assert their needs and demand health care.