Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I would also like to thank all the members of the committee for agreeing to hear from us today.
We are going to do our presentation in English, but I can assure you that, at the end of our remarks, Ms. O'Donnell and I will be ready to take your questions in either English or French.
Thank you very much, members of the committee, for receiving us today.
I'll say a few words on behalf of Concordia, and then I'll ask Dr. O'Donnell to complete our brief presentation.
We will be very happy to take questions in either English or French.
Although the roots of our founding institutions go back more than 160 years, Concordia University, as it stands today, was formed in 1974 through the merger of Loyola College and Sir George Williams University. Concordia is an open and engaged university with a student body of over 46,000 in the faculties of arts and science, fine arts, engineering and computer science, the John Wilson School of Business, and the School of Extended Learning.
By creating links between education and social responsibility, Concordia fosters an academic environment that allows students and faculty to thrive on an interdisciplinary approach to research, creative activity, and community engagement. Since its founding, Concordia has been characterized by the cosmopolitan and socially complex nature of Montreal. We pride ourselves in what we see as our unique mission of social integration. Concordia is proud to be an English language institution in Montreal, the metropolis of Quebec. We also pride ourselves in having a unique mission of transformation in our society, a mission we believe to be essential.
Concordia houses, and is proud to house, the Quebec English-speaking community's research network, QUESCREN.
In French, it is called the Réseau de recherche sur les communautés québécoises d'expression anglaise.
QUESCREN was officially launched in the spring of 2009 and is a joint initiative of the Canadian Institute for Research on Linguistic Minorities, located in Moncton, New Brunswick, Concordia University's School of Extended Learning, and the Department of Canadian Heritage.
QUESCREN is a network of researchers, community members, and institutions dedicated to developing research capacity related to Quebec's English-speaking communities. The goal of QUESCREN is to strengthen and maintain a network of researchers and institutions to produce and share evidence-based research results on the English-speaking minority communities of Quebec. Our research partners include the Quebec Community Groups Network, the Department of Canadian Heritage, and Industry Canada.
Concordia University's research profile and research capacity have been making great progress in recent years. From structural and functional genomics to computer security and human development, Concordia encourages a collaborative research environment where different research units complement the university and our society as a whole. With this big-picture thinking in mind, housing QUESCREN is a natural fit for Concordia.
Research produced by QUESCREN and its partners helps assess questions of fundamental importance for Quebec's English speakers, such as community vitality—and Dr. O'Donnell will have something to say about that in a moment—demographic shifts, identity, arts, culture, and heritage. The network is an ideal vehicle for researchers, service providers, and policy-makers to share information and best practices. A key example of this is QUESCREN's annual conference, which shares results of studies carried out by many researchers on Quebec's English-speaking communities. It fosters fruitful exchange between English- and French-speaking research producers and users within the context of the province's most important annual research event, the congress of the Association francophone pour le savoir.
From our perspective, we believe that all stakeholders, that is, government, community groups, and community members, benefit from thorough, up-to-date research and analysis on the English-speaking communities of Quebec.
What do we mean by research? More than a simple collection of statistics, we feel that what is really needed is an accurate portrait of the English-speaking communities of Quebec, who we are, where we're going, which policies are working, and which policies may need improvement. There are many myths about Quebec's English speakers held by the French-speaking majority, and to some extent by the rest of Canada. For example, there is still a prevailing view that anglophones in the province are relatively wealthy compared to the Quebec majority, when in fact we now know the opposite to be true.
Accurate, up-to-date research on the English-speaking community can help eradicate some of these myths and sensitize the population to the challenges we face. Critically, this research will provide the government with an additional tool to review, evaluate, and improve existing policies and proactively develop new policies to deliver services and support long-term development.
I'll now ask Dr. O'Donnell to say a few words about QUESCREN.