Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I'm going to ask my questions in English.
I want to direct my questions to Monsieur Labrie about the role that Canadian universities can play in the Government of Canada's renewal of the public service.
We're the largest employer in the country. We directly employ, in the public service, 263,000 people. If you include the Department of National Defence, the Canadian Forces, and the crown corporations and agencies, the number is probably closer to 400,000 or 450,000 people.
We are the largest employer. We're the most national employer. We have 1,600 points of service and offices in Canada. We're the most international employer. We operate in 150 countries abroad.
We're the largest single employer in the country and the most diverse in terms of geographic spread and the capabilities and responsibilities of the government. We're also undergoing the single largest renewal of any organization in the history of the country.
Twenty-five per cent of the public service can retire in the next three years, by 2012, and we are presently hiring 10,000 to 12,000 Canadians a year. The average age of the executives in the public service is 50. In other words, in the next 10 to 15 years, that entire executive class in the public service will need to be replaced.
We have significant challenges facing us. This renewal of the public service that is going to take place is the largest in this country's history, and we need to have the country's most qualified graduates, reflecting not only our diversity but our linguistic duality. But I don't believe we're getting the graduates we need from Canadian universities, especially from anglophone universities.
We're not getting them in terms of the diversity requirements that need to be met. The statistics show that the number of visible minorities in the public service has consistently not been up to the levels we need. That is a long-standing problem. Also, we're not getting the bilingual graduates we need to staff the public service. That's also clear in the fact that we have to devote a significant amount of resources to retraining this country's recently graduated students to learn the other language. In most cases, more often than not, it's to learn French.
I think the University of Toronto, as the largest and one of the most pre-eminent universities on this continent, has a leadership role to play in helping us get the public servants we need to meet the challenges of this century. I start that off by way of background.
The trends are not encouraging. When we look at the graduates we're receiving from Canadian high schools and secondary institutions, the trends aren't good. Statistics Canada reports that the percentage of bilingual students from 15 to 19 years old fell from about 25% to 22% over the 10-year period from 1996 to 2006.
I have a number of questions for you. First, have the federal government, the Clerk of the Privy Council, and federal institutions been working with the University of Toronto and with other universities in Canada to develop strategies to help us meet the need for more bilingual public servants?