First of all, I want to welcome the witnesses for being with us today. I am from New Brunswick, Canada's only bilingual province.
In my last few years of teaching I was in an immersion school, so I saw first-hand how the students, just like a sponge, can absorb all this. I wasn't teaching French, as you can figure out.
I agree with Janice Best when she says that quite often principals have to grab the first person they can get. In our school we were very fortunate in having a young man who throughout his years of university travelled through different provinces in Canada and studied French. He also then travelled to Europe for maybe even several summers after he became a teacher. There is a great benefit, and you see that with the students. Not only does he bring all kinds of ideas, but he also opens the idea of travel to children and shows that there's more to life than just the Miramichi, even though we like to think that's not true.
Are there not more initiatives that we could have to offer advantages not just to university students, but to these young teachers who are going into the classrooms? I know I have a godchild up there who is just starting her first couple of years of teaching. She is teaching French immersion. I was just thinking not only she, herself, but other teachers in our province could benefit from programs that would help teachers to see different involvement and so on.
I am wondering if the universities have anything for teachers. That question is open to anybody, it doesn't matter who.