I've had a little trouble following the discussion, until now, not because it's being conducted in English and French, but rather because first we talked about literacy, then about assimilation, and then it was mentioned that too much money was allocated to the English language universities in Quebec because the numbers ratios are different. I find it hard to include all these elements in a whole. I'm in a way looking for a common theme among our witnesses, and I'm trying to determine what problem or subject we're discussing today.
With regard to literacy, as far as I know, education is mandatory until the age of 16, at least here in Canada. Upon turning 16, a person will have attended school for 10 or 11 years before being able to drop out legally. So if we've wound up with an illiteracy rate of 49 %, perhaps you're speaking to the wrong people, because primary and secondary education are a provincial jurisdiction. If the failure rate is 49%, monitoring should have been done at the provincial level so that illiterates would not represent more than 10 or 15% of the population of Canada.