Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
I am the executive director of the Conseil de la coopération de la Saskatchewan. This francophone economic organization provides economic development services to businesses and communities.
Business development means creating, maintaining and supporting businesses, as well as a new component, which is supporting the workforce because of the economic situation in Saskatchewan and the province's current labour needs.
With respect to francophones, the population in our province is aging. This is true not only of francophones, but also of everyone. It is clear that we have to meet some glaring labour needs.
We recently conducted a study on potential economic immigration to support francophone minority communities, particularly in Saskatchewan. The results of the study showed that there are needs not just in Saskatchewan, but throughout Canada. We need to be able to support these communities.
I'll give you an example. In 2012 in Saskatchewan, there were nearly 10,000 job offers for temporary foreign workers. Of these 10,000 jobs, there were barely a hundred francophones.
We think that the new express entry system and the new way of bringing immigrants to Canada is an opportunity to strengthen francophone communities by providing support to businesses in order to improve not only the situation of francophones in the province but also across the provincial economy in terms of our schools and so on.
We know that when people arrive in Saskatchewan, if we want to retain them, we need to be able to provide a framework to help them integrate, settle in and so on. There also needs to be an economic integration process. This is done two ways: through the labour market or through business or other creation.
We think it is very important for francophone communities to have the resources to help employers in this respect. I'm not talking about francophone employers, but anglophone employers who are willing to hire francophones so that they can settle here, in Canada. To do this, there are a large number of businesses in Canada, and the micro-enterprises are major employers in this regard. According to some statistics that we saw recently, close to 50% of the 10,000 job applications in 2012 that I mentioned are from micro-enterprises that were looking for temporary foreign workers.
For us, that means not only being involved in the local and provincial economy, but also providing our growing community with an opportunity to improve their French. We also believe that micro-enterprises are the ones that have the fewest resources to do all the work necessary to take care of the paperwork, guidance and so on. Small businesses have fewer human resources than many others. So we would like to contribute at that level. To increase the number of francophones in the regions, these businesses need to be supported through a preparation and selection process to bring francophones to a given region.
Our organization does this broadly. It seems fairly simple, but all the work we have to do to provide businesses with guidance and support requires resources and tools to ensure the success of our initiatives.
I could give you some detailed statistics, but it isn't easy by telephone.
I'm just in Saskatoon for a staff meeting. We had a presentation on this. Throughout the day, I was thinking about the best way to provide specialized services to businesses by transferring knowledge to them so that they can stand on their own and welcome immigrants.
You caught me a little by surprise because I didn't think I was going to be the first presenter. I thought there would be a round table first.
In short, that's what I wanted to say on the topic.