Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Thank you for your preliminary report, Mr. Fraser.
Thank you very much for this. I have a suggestion and then a question.
My suggestion is that one of the things you might include in your final report is a greater elucidation of the need for the Government of Canada to have bilingual graduates from Canadian universities. It's not something that I see in this report. You have a section titled “Need and Demand”, so it might be a good area in which to slot the fact that we have a huge need for bilingual graduates from Canadian universities. It's not just a stick issue; it's also a carrot issue.
We are the largest employer in the country. We directly employ 260,000 public servants, and if you include the armed forces and crown corporations and federal agencies, that number is well into the 400,000 range. We are the largest hirer. We hire 10,000 people into the public service alone, every year, the equivalent of a General Motors every single year. In fact, we hire more than the payroll of all the employees of General Motors every year. In fact, in the next decade we are going to likely hire close to 100,000 new public servants. These are great jobs. They're well-paying jobs that provide the stability that only a government can, and they include defined benefit pensions, which obviously is a big issue right now. Yet we're not getting the university graduates we need from Canadian universities. So I think this is certainly an area that needs to be really emphasized in the final report because I think it will highlight to universities and to younger Canadians that there is this employer that needs them to come out of university with the knowledge of both official languages.
That's my comment.
My question is at this stage--I know you haven't finished your report--can you tell us the top one or two things that our government could do to get universities in Canada, get colleges, to produce a greater number of bilingual graduates? What are the number one or two things that we as a government can do to encourage that?