Mr. Charbonneau and Mr. Pelletier, thank you for coming to meet with us.
I saw you in Toronto, when we visited your centre. That was where I learned that there were 192,000 francophones in Toronto and that the second language was Chinese, no longer French, as a result of which the questions we asked you were very strange.
Coming back to you, Mr. Charbonneau. I come from Quebec, and my children have studied in Alberta. They are Franco-Albertans. My four children attended primary school, and English was not systematically taught. In some public colleges, English was even literally banished. At one time—my children are in their thirties—people took a very dim view of English. So I know both system.
My children then attended private teaching institutions. There was an improvement, but there was still a lot of reluctance. Then we went to live in Alberta, and they attended the École Saint-Jean, which subsequently became the Faculté Saint-Jean. As a member of the Association des universités de la francophonie canadienne, you know that we managed to have that school become a faculty.
In that place, the funding that the Edmonton School Board allocates to francophones exceeds, on a population basis, the funding that certain Quebec school commissions allocate to francophones. We're always told that Alberta is rich, but I believe that political decisions also come into play.
I'll bring you back to Quebec. You saw what they did on the other side. In Quebec, everything falls under provincial jurisdiction. The message that must be sent to the provinces—and on this point, I agree with Mr. Rodriguez—on the subject of second language instruction in a minority situation is that we have no control over the funding allocated for that purpose. The provincial government receives the funding and, in some cases, we try to see whether it's correct.
I wonder about Quebec. If English is virtually swept under the carpet at the primary and secondary levels, students will have a problem when they start professional or college studies because there's no training. The situation is even worse at the university level: there are second-language illiterates. We can tell you a lot of things, but if the basics aren't working, it serves no purpose.
Mr. Charbonneau, you who represent the Association des universités de la francophonie canadienne, can you suggest to us what we could do to enable students to continue their studies in their second language at francophone universities? In Quebec's francophone universities, the same difficulty arises for English as a second language. Some universities, like McGill University, are anglophone first of all and have trouble teaching French as a second language.
What do we do now?