Thank you for inviting me to come and speak to you this morning. My opening remarks are intended to give you a factual overview of how HRSDC supports postsecondary education. Then I will give offer commentary on some policy areas where HRSDC supports official language minority communities. Finally I will note some actions where HRSDC supports post secondary education and official language minority communities.
First of all, the Government of Canada supports postsecondary education in three broad ways: through transfers to provinces through the Canada Social transfer; through support to institutional research; and through support to students.
Our department's specific support for postsecondary education is targeted directly to learners. That's our role. It facilitates access to PSE and to promote student choice in their selection of PSE institution. The department's support is focused on individuals, not on institutions or provinces.
Let me give you a description of HRSDC's efforts to support postsecondary education.
The Canada student loans program was created in 1964 as a statutory spending program within HRSDC. Its mission is to promote accessibility of post-secondary education for students with demonstrated financial need, by lowering financial barriers through the provision of loans and grants, and to ensure that Canadians have an opportunity to develop the knowledge and skills to participate in the economy and society.
Through the Canada student grant program, numerous grants are available to increase the participation of underrepresented groups in post-secondary education, as well as to encourage parents to start saving early for their children's post-secondary education. Grants are also available for students in a variety of fields who are at different levels in their education.
HRSDC also provides a number of savings incentives to students and their families, which are administered through the Canada education savings program. That program promotes family savings for post-secondary education by encouraging contributions to registered education savings programs.
The department promotes international mobility through its International Academic Mobility Initiative, which supports Canada's higher education community in developing and enhancing international education partnerships.
HRSDC also provides substantial investments in support of adult training and skills upgrading through bilateral agreements with provinces and territories. Many of these investments indirectly benefit post-secondary institutions, as community colleges in particular are providers of much of the training those funding dollars support.
Budget 2007 announced a new Labour Market Architecture acknowledging responsibility of provinces and territories for design and delivery of labour market programming.
While broad and comprehensive, GoC support for postsecondary education respects the provincial/territorial constitutional responsibility for education. Although there is significant national interest in postsecondary education, it is a provincial jurisdiction with clearly articulated provincial responsibilities in the domain of education which place the administration and practices of the postsecondary education under the accountability of provincial governments.
Further, HRSDC is home to a set of programs and activities that have indirect impact on the development of official language minority communities. There is some potential spillover in the area of learning in particular and post-secondary education, where, speaking broadly, between 2008 and 2013 these programs will receive $94 million in funding.
I can give you a list of the broad funding programs. First, a $69 million enabling fund, as it's called, provides resources to strengthen the capacity of networks to mobilize support for community economic development projects; to create partnerships between private, public, and non-profit sectors; and to optimize the financial resources from other levels of government. There is a pilot child care project, which aims to assess the impact of French language preschool programs on linguistic and cultural development. There is a family literacy initiative, which expands access to family literacy in francophone minority communities and in partnership with government agencies and various family literacy communities. In addition, there is a $4 million initiative to build capacity of non-governmental organizations for early childhood development.
I'm describing these not because they bear directly on post-secondary education. Rather, everything we know about post-secondary education points to the importance of early child development, for example, as critical to developing the capacity to participate later in life in post-secondary education.
I'll next look at how our activities as a department affect minority language communities.
One of the most significant areas of activity where HRSDC support for postsecondary education and for official language minority communities comes together is in the area of research.
Through participation in research and the use of survey instruments.... There are a number of instruments here, which I can elaborate on later. They include the Programme for International Student Assessment, the Youth in Transition Survey, and the International Adult Literacy and Skills Survey. Some of the projects are undertaken jointly with the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, or OECD.
Many of those projects do oversampling. They take larger samples from minority language community populations, specifically in Canada, in order to get a measure of skill levels and literacy levels among student and adult populations. Our researchers in HRSDC have contributed to greater understanding of official languages proficiency as a result of this research.
In addition, the Canada education savings program has targeted official languages minority communities through a set of outreach activities, with a view to raising the awareness and the use of the Canada education savings grants and the Canada learning bond in francophone minority communities in Ontario.
Thank you for the opportunity to speak to you this morning.