I think that your question is very timely. The fact that you're asking is proof of the benefits of your language exchange experience.
Young people are more bilingual today than they used to. In fact, there are twice as many bilingual individuals as there were 35 years ago. In fact, they have become more multilingual as well. But that isn't the case for all young people. I used to work in universities and therefore I was very much involved with young people. Young people do not define their identity in the same way previous generations did. We have seen in the more bilingual regions that young people often identify themselves not as francophones or anglophones, but rather as bilingual. That did not previously exist.
I think that the best way to reach young people — we mentioned this earlier when we were talking about priorities for a new commissioner or for yourselves — is probably to use new communication technology. Young people participate in blogs and the like. I think that is how we need to reach them. I don't think that it will happen by making speeches, and so on. We have a young public and we could find a better way of encouraging them to become involved. They already constitute fertile ground in terms of their openness to diversity because many of them, particularly those who come from urban centres, have grown up in multilingual and diverse circumstances.
Of course, education is a provincial not a federal, jurisdiction. However, the federal government's main challenge is to find a way, as we've done with the action plan, to assist provinces in their efforts to improve access to training in the second official language. We could offer resources, and consider recommendations, as some have recently done, to the effect that post-secondary institutions commit to preserving knowledge of English and French acquired in secondary institutions. In some areas of the country, because post-secondary institutions do not offer programs or services in French, young people lose their knowledge of that language.