Good morning. Bonjour. Thank you for the invitation this morning. It's a pleasure to be here.
I have a few comments to add to Mr. Donnelly's report.
Canadian Parents for French, as you know, is an organization that has been around since 1977 and since 2004 in Quebec. We have a mission of supporting French as a second language activity in the minority communities in Quebec. We have developed a number of initiatives and projects over the years. For example, there are school exchanges between English and French schools, and our public speaking contest, the Concours d'art oratoire, is very popular with the anglophone community. With a committee we organize French for the Future, a day of culture in French for the anglophone community in the Montreal area, and we have several other projects.
Structurally, we think there are some specific improvements that can be made in the funding mechanisms for minority community groups. We have an obligation to spend all of our money by March 31, within the fiscal year, which we obviously do our best to do under the circumstances. However, that means that by the time we receive our next instalment of funding--which this year was May 15--there's no money in the bank. What that means for us is that we went without salary for the month of May, for example. As Robert suggested, it does have an personal impact.
It seems to me that there's something wrong with that picture, particularly when you have community groups that have a history, have been around for many years, with consistent reporting and so on. It seems to me that it should be somewhat automatic to say, for those kind of groups, these guys have a history with us. So the suggestion that we need to improve our way of dealing with community groups is well received on our part as well.
There are too many steps in order to get a report approved right now. It goes to your agent, it comes back with questions, it goes up the ladder, it comes back with questions, and so on. Those steps can take weeks and weeks before we receive final approval of our report. Then it goes to finance and we get more questions. All of those questions are legitimate, and we're not suggesting that we shouldn't answer them or that we should not be accountable. We should be, and we appreciate that, but there's a significant time lapse involved in that process. In the meantime, we run out of money.
For example, the 25% that we received this year is long gone. It means that, as suggested earlier, we've lost some credibility with our landlord; we've lost credibility with partners who are waiting for our activities to begin, but they can't begin because we haven't received the funding for them. I'm getting weekly phone calls asking when we're starting, because others need to schedule their fall activity and they have to decide if they're going to work with CPF or not. I can't answer them, unfortunately, until we actually have the funds in the bank to proceed. So it's definitely a credibility issue for us.
We made a request for project funding for a 12-month project. Now that the approval has come through, we haven't received the funding yet. When we get the funding, we have to spend it in what is left of this fiscal year. So the amount that we requested for perhaps a 10-month project now becomes money that has to be spent in five months. All of the organization that has to take place in order to spend that funding by March 31, in order to account for it, is compressed into this time span. Those are issues for organizations such as ours because we are small organizations. In Quebec we have one and a half staff, so we have to do a lot of work in order to accomplish those projects.
Also, in prior years we were used to receiving 50% of our funding in the April to May period. When we only received 25% this year, it was obviously a cause for hardship. It seems to me that you're going to have to go back to the point where we get that 50% up front, which would allow you to carry on your activity. We're expected to report on 50% of our activity at the end of September. We do an interim report. We have to report that with only 25% of our funding we didn't achieve 50% of our objectives. Clearly, that's something that can reflect negatively on us as an organization. If it's performance indicators that we're attempting to meet, we can't achieve that 50% of performance indicators with 25% of our funding.
On the other issue about lack of funding expenses for our line of credit—we have a small line of credit with the bank—those expenses aren't covered in any agreements we have anyone. Those expenses come out of operational costs.
Also, our board limits its capacity to meet—because governance is an issue for our organizations—and not having the funding for our board to meet face to face is a limitation on our organization.
Thank you.