You're exactly right. We are very much engaged with our departments on that issue. It is a challenge.
The presentation mentioned the significant proportion to date of our current francophone immigrants who have come through the humanitarian category, most often from Africa. When individuals come from a war-torn background, with an interrupted education, and so forth, it is a challenge to try to fit them into the school system.
There is a type of prevailing pedagogical philosophy that says it's best to put people of similar age with cohorts, but it sometimes doesn't work because they've missed several years of schooling and so on. It is a significant problem that we want to engage more successfully on, through a couple of avenues that we're looking at.
One is that inside the Manitoba government we recognized that when we started small, everything that had to do with immigration could be located within one department. It came down to me and my colleagues or my predecessor dealing with them. For success in immigration, and with the support we had at the grassroots level, we needed to give a message to our colleagues in other departments that in many ways it's everybody's job to successfully settle immigrants.
We have a very successful growth strategy initiative that was launched by our previous immigration minister, Nancy Allan. It's an ongoing strategic partnership with other departments on education and training, and with the French language secretariat and so on, to address these problems. It can often become localized within one department and people then say it's not their mandate. We need to have a shared mandate. I think that's what's been recognized in Manitoba.
On the other piece, I think we need to involve Citizenship and Immigration Canada more on the front end.