Thank you, Mr. Chair and members of the Standing Committee on Official Languages.
The Quebec English School Boards Association welcomes this opportunity to engage in an important discussion with you on the contributions, concerns, and expectations that characterize Canada's other official language minority community, which is the English linguistic minority in Quebec, or, if you like, as the QCGN developed two weekends ago,
we are English-speaking Quebeckers. That is new.
Our focus, of course, will be on public education. QESBA is the voice of English public education. We are now approximately 87 years old in Quebec—so it's not an institution born yesterday—and we have the wonderful responsibility and honourable task of educating the children of our artists in Quebec.
QESBA is the voice of English public education, representing nine English school boards, serving some 100,000 students, 340 elementary and secondary high schools, vocational and adult centres, and of course community learning centres, which you will hear us talk more about later.
Our clientele is about as large as the francophone minority in 8 of the 10 provinces. Mr. Bélanger will, I'm sure, correct me if I am mistaken.
QESBA was proud to appear before the Senate Committee on Official Languages, when it turned toward our province in the fall of 2010, and was greatly encouraged by its final report, The Vitality of Quebec's English-Speaking Communities: From Myth to Reality, released last March.
In the report's preamble were three messages identified as the key ones by the committee itself. Second among them was the quote:
The government needs to recognize that since the realities and challenges experienced by the English-speaking and French-speaking minorities are sometimes similar but sometimes different, each minority must be treated in a way that takes its specific needs into account.
I would say that speaks for our francophone brethren in other provinces, as well as the anglophones in Quebec.
Our brief remarks on the contributions, concerns, and expectations facing English public education in Quebec are predicated on this federal government and future ones, heeding an important second message from your Senate standing committee. Allow us to speak on four key contributions, and to hope that our subsequent discussion will leave time for a more complete list.
Firstly, with the vital help of the Canada-Québec Entente on minority and second language education, our students are graduating from English public schools with an increased capacity to live and work in French—I have three of those graduates in my family—who stay in the province and work in both languages. Our school system is a world pioneer of bilingualism. If you look at what's happened as a result of the financial support in this vital agreement, we have produced students who not only see it as not a chore to speak French, but see it as an automatisme. It is part of their daily life and culture, like our poutine would be to the kids.
Second, as you will surely hear from other groups, the growing network of community learning centres, CLCs, within our English schools is breathing new life, stability, creativity, and cooperation in urban, rural, and suburban communities across English-speaking Quebec. In some rural communities, the federal support for the CLC has made the difference between compromising the future of a community by closing down a school and building new coalitions and partnerships toward an invigorated community. Remember, for some communities, if there is no school, there is no more sustainability. Even if it's not in your little village, it may be the centre for many villages.
I'm going to turn this over now to my colleague, Michael Chiasson. Mike, by the way, is the chairman of the Western Quebec School Board, just across the river from here. It covers the territory from east of Gatineau to the Ontario border. We count the beavers in his enrollment as well.