Thank you, Chair.
I would like to thank the witnesses for being here today.
If it's all right, I'll pose my questions in English.
It's a treat to have you here today. I do find it a bit interesting. I come from Toronto, so I have a bit of a different perspective. I realize Quebec is certainly not a mirror image at all. It's a whole different set of circumstances. But you can imagine an English language school in Ontario where French immersion is seen as something very popular. It tends to be an upper middle class kind of thing. It goes along with the Louis Vuitton handbag; you put your kid in French immersion. So to hear about needing more money from the government, that's not necessarily viewed by people whose kids are not in French immersion as necessary.
That's just the reality. It's viewed as something very desirable, especially among new Canadians, who come to Canada and want to put their kids into French immersion and get that full experience. They really tend to drive their children much harder academically, and they view that as an extra challenge that they want to put in front of their children.
My question is in some ways similar to Monsieur Dion's in the sense that education is clearly a provincial responsibility, and I don't think anybody on this committee is proposing that we should federalize education, that the federal government should take over the responsibilities of the provincial government. You wouldn't want to get into a situation where a school board said, “We don't need to worry about French immersion. The feds are paying for it, so we can vacate that”. I don't think we want to get into that situation.
So the question is, what kinds of additional value can the federal government add to supplement education? We don't want to allow a province to shirk its responsibilities to provide the educational programs that it should provide, whether that's immersion or other conventional programs, but are there things? You mentioned research and support and evaluation and community learning centres.
Again, I'm not an expert on education, and maybe there are things we are currently doing with respect to the federal government's intervention. It's a pillar of that road map that we've identified based on feedback from stakeholder groups across the country. Education, immigration, community support are the three big pillars of the road map, but what is it in education that the federal government can really do to improve linguistic duality?