Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Good morning, Ms. Poirier, Mr. Dulude and Mr. Rainville.
We are studying the fact that the federal public service has a duty to ensure that government employees are bilingual. We thought of universities as the place where you have to go to earn a degree, to be able to apply for a federal government position and eventually to get a position.
My question comes in the wake of some thoughts shared with some of your colleagues. I would like to know what you think about the idea of inviting people whose first language is English to study in a university environment where the first language is French—in Quebec, for example, in a francophone environment—so that those people actually become bilingual. That method might perhaps be more effective than federal government grants to universities that take that money—and I understand why—to create programs that are too often worthless. We saw an example of that in certain universities in British Columbia, where the quality of French is very poor. People who took those courses, and whose first language was French, were extremely disappointed.
My question is for all the witnesses.