Merci, Mr. Chair.
I want to build on what Monsieur Godin was saying about our education system in Canada.
Clearly, the number one challenge with respect to the French fact in Canada is that the long-term trends are not good. The percentage of francophones in Canada is on the decline, has been for decades, and will be for future decades. This is the number one challenge we're facing.
I've always been of the view that we can take a defensive posture about this or an offensive posture. The defensive posture is simply to protect the number of francophones that we have in the country. The offensive position would be to say let's try to increase the number of bilingual Canadians, those who can speak both official languages. When you look at our education system, the building block for it is the public education system, our high schools and primary schools, which feed into the university system.
My question is directed to CMEC because the Canadian government, under the previous action plan developed by Mr. Dion and recommitted to by our government, provided over $1 billion through the protocol through your organization to provinces to promote not only minority language instruction but second language instruction. One of the key targets that was established back in 2005 was that by 2013 the number of bilingual graduates from Canadian high schools would double. From what I'm hearing, only four years from that target, we are not going to meet it.
My first question is why that is. Why are we not going to meet the commitment that the federal and provincial governments made through bilateral agreements and through action plans to double the number of bilingual graduates in Canada?