Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I would like to take this opportunity to thank you for having invited me to make a five-minute presentation on the Institut français of the University of Regina.
I would have liked to have an opportunity to explain to you how this new university institution enhances the vitality of the Franco-Saskatchewanian community and I hope we will be able to discuss that over the next two hours. But I will essentially focus on our achievements in this area since the inception of our institute in 2003.
A community's vitality is measured by its ability to innovate, to create and to provoke change. There are risks involved in doing that. We welcome this risk and it was part of the creation of our institute from the start. We cannot turn a blind eye to the fact that a large majority of our students, or 80% of them, do not have French as their mother tongue. They are considered francophiles. Our challenge is to be able to confront uncertainty. We cannot count on historical progress, etc. We have to manage this uncertainty in a way, which I will get to momentarily.
What do we do and who are we? Our institute was created by the Franco-Saskatchewanian community in partnership with the University of Regina and both levels of government. It was created in 2003 within the University of Regina. It has faculty status. The director of the institute has the status of dean and sits on the council of deans. We are a full-fledged entity within the University of Regina. Our mandate is francophone community development through education, research and university services. We are the only university institution to have a provincial mandate in Saskatchewan.
How does all this work? We received five-year funding which began in 2003 and will end in 2008. We have benefited from and will continue to greatly benefit from the Dion Plan, its philosophy and its concrete actions. We participate in language training for public servants, a growing sector within the University of Regina. I referred to managing uncertainty. You have to understand that we exist within a majority that has a lot of difficulty understanding why we are here. We have a vision of education which is different from that of the anglophone majority.
To us, education is first and foremost a community development tool. You know that in other universities in a majority context, education is a commercial product competing with that of other universities. That is not our case. We are an actual community development tool and we need the support of the community and of our partners. We are partners with the Association des universités de la francophonie canadienne, as is the Collège universitaire de Saint-Boniface, the Faculté de Saint-Jean, the Université d'Ottawa, the Université de Moncton and others.
We have six French education BA programs as well as a BA in francophone studies. We are currently setting up—and this is an innovation here in Canada—a professional community development program. We are a leader in the field of intercultural research in western Canada. In addition, and you may have heard of this—we contributed to re-establishing a dialogue between francophones and Metis, a dialogue which had been brought to a halt 120 years ago at the time of Louis Riel's hanging. Since then, many community initiatives with the university and the Metis were established, including a francophone-Metis discussion group and several research projects with the Metis.
As I said earlier, our funding will end in 2008. Obviously we have progressed very quickly over the last four years. We are counting on upcoming funding which we need for several reasons. First, we need funding to continue the programs which we have created. There are not many of them. They are targeted and they really meet the needs of our community. We also need funding for research and for our premises.
Within the University of Regina, we are located in a building that is shared with other tenants. Despite initial reluctance from the university, we managed to get one francophone unit back, by cooperating closely with the university. There are three French units on campus—including a BA program in our building—and we wanted to add another French unit, the French department. We are looking to integrate these three units within one, the Institut français.
Obviously you must realize that five years is very little time to do all of this. We have managed quite a bit and cannot stop here. We need the support of our various partners, such as the federal government.
I would like to close by saying that the work we do at the institute not only serves francophones, but it extends to the national and international levels, because we now work with various international partners.