I'd like to draw your attention to the findings of a study that the Conference Board of Canada did within the past two years. The study showed that bilingualism in New Brunswick and Quebec resulted in billions of dollars in additional economic benefits. In Ontario, we'd like to see what those figures would be if the province were to ever decide to become officially bilingual. Clearly a francophone economy exists, and it may be larger than we think.
I'd also like to point out that Canada's French fact isn't limited to Canada's francophones. In Ontario, enrolment in French-language schools recently hit 100,000 students. I'll give you a statistic. Ontario has twice as many anglophones in immersion schools, as compared with French-language schools. As we speak, more than 300,000 students in Ontario are in an immersion school. Our friends at Canadian Parents for French, whom we work with a lot, often tell us that the school boards can't even keep up with the demand for immersion programs.
There's still a lot of room for improvement when it comes to the status of French in Canada and global competitiveness. We need to ask ourselves what kind of country we want. If we truly want a bilingual country, we need to give every Canadian the opportunity to benefit from both official languages.