There were two aspects to your question. As for the first one, we clearly recommend that the federal government renew the agreements on a multi-year basis in the future. We would also like reporting to be done on a multi-year basis. If we were to sign a four-year agreement, we would not have to redo all of the same procedures, administrative work, reports, and so on, every year. Otherwise, our only advantage would be having a guarantee that we would have the same amount of money in four years. That is the effect that these multi-year agreements have had over the past four years. Our only guarantee was to have the same amount of money in 2008 as in 2004. Therefore, we are fine with the multi-year agreement, provided that it includes an increase in keeping with inflation or another mechanism that officials could put in place.
As regards education, I am the former president of the Commission scolaire francophone du Yukon, the only one, and I sat on the committee that was struck to build the school in 1995. We had been fighting for that school since the 1980s. The school projects the image of a beautiful castle, but that does not mean that it wasn't built without a lot of hard work.
When the only francophone school in the Yukon was built, the federal government paid two-thirds of the cost, although education is a provincial and territorial jurisdiction. Building this school did not cost the Yukon government very much. Two schools were built at the same time. The francophone school cost $8 million, and the anglophone school, $9 million. The Yukon paid for the anglophone school in its entirety and for approximately one-third of the francophone school.
We need to expand it, because at the time, in the 1980s, there were only 26 young people. At the time, people said there were no francophones in the Yukon.