Thank you, Mr. Chair.
We need to encourage English Canadians to learn French in order to become bilingual. I know that at some point we had developed programs. The University of British Columbia, for one, offered courses in French, regardless of the subject, under pilot projects. They realized that for a lot of university students their level of French was not adequate for taking a course in everyday French. Those students had taken immersion programs, but they were not sufficiently familiar with the ins and outs of the language. So the stopped offering those courses, because the students who were fluent in French found that they were wasting their time.
I know that you work in postsecondary education, apart from CMEC, which also involves postsecondary education. I know that some anglophone school boards are removing basic French courses for anglophones from their curricula, or simply eliminating immersion programs. If we do away with French as a second language courses at the secondary level, how can we consider teaching people in French in the anglophone world, when the students have only a basic knowledge of French when they enter university?