I'm talking in terms of the two official languages, not in terms of allophones and other Canadians whose first language is something other than those two official languages. The view in the country in terms of the two official languages and the broad trends is that French is in decline and English is on the rise.
That's been the broad trend over the last 100 years, and it is still going on. The number--optimistically, and giving us cause for hope--of bilingual speakers is also on the rise. However, we have a big, broad problem here, which is that the federal government, its institutions, its agencies, its crown corporations, its areas of direct administration are officially bilingual, but the reality on the ground in the country is that the vast majority of Canadians are not bilingual.
So there's a gap between the country's national institutions, which employ over 400,000 people, and the education system, which is not requiring students to be bilingual. So we're really creating a system of elites in this country who have access to bilingual education and who can speak the two languages, and a system for everybody else who can't speak the other official language. It's a huge problem in the long run, I think.
It's creating a situation that if you want to access the upper echelons of the public service, the crown corporations and the like, you can't, and that's the reality. I think we have a structural problem within our society that we, in the long run, have to address. In my view, the best way to address this is with the education system.
I believe in the preservation of the French fact in Canada. However, in my view, there is a big gap between the education system, which doesn't require students to know the other official language in order to obtain their diploma, and the country's national institutions. I don't understand why there isn't more of a consensus to address this gap.
If the education system were graduating students who couldn't read or write or who couldn't do mathematics or who the business community felt were not up to par, you'd hear a hue and cry from the business community that the country's universities and its high schools were simply not up to standard and we needed to improve this. But you don't hear the same hue and cry about the country's largest employer requiring someone to know both official languages to move up or to participate, and the fact that we're simply not doing that with our public education systems I think is a huge structural problem.
I'd be interested to hear if your office in the past or present has done any work on what it would cost, what it would take, to use the federal spending power to encourage provinces to require that both official languages be known as a requirement for graduation, and I think to accommodate the increasing diversity of this country, to do what the Europeans do, which is one plus two.