Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I hope that Ms. Lemieux will accept my sincere apologies. Ms. Lemieux, earlier, I gave you the wrong title. I hope that you will forgive me.
Those of you who do not know what I am talking about should read the "blues".
Now that that is out of the way, Commissioner, you spoke about education in the language of the minority. There is what we call FL1, French as a first language, and FL2, French as second language. Under the action plan, the goal is to increase enrolment in minority official language community schools so that, by 2013, 80% of eligible children are enrolled. I do hope that we achieve 100%.
In the late 1990s, when I left Saskatchewan where I taught at the École canadienne-française de Saskatoon, there was a 10% enrolment rate even though Saskatoon is the most populous city in the province. We had our work cut out for us and there were hurdles. I am going to speak to you frankly and I am going to tell you what those hurdles were. We met with Canadian Parents for French and told them that it is all well and good to have immersion students, but that rights holders, in other words those young people whose mother tongue was French, should be in our schools. They agreed, but they said that these students were role models for their own children. So that kind of discussion went on. It was a problem. It was quite clearly a case of recruitment.
What is more, these school divisions or school boards did not want to lose these children because at the time the provincial budget allocated $5,400 per child. In addition to that, the Department of Education did not want to promote our schools, which accounted for one of the seven categories of schools of the Fransaskois School Board of Saskatchewan.
The purpose of the action plan is to meet the community's needs, that much we agree on. Can you shed some light on the matter and tell us how to successfully reach this goal of 80%? Can you answer that question and can you tell us what is currently happening? Earlier you referred to Edmonton. I assume that the Edmonton School Board had shown willingness to move forward on this.
I would like to speak to that issue.