Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Vancouver.
I represent the Office of Francophone and Francophile Affairs. This is an office that coordinates, promotes and develops courses in French at Simon Fraser University. I work mainly with two faculties, the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences and the Faculty of Education. For example, teacher training is an area that interests us a great deal.
The Office of Francophone and Francophile Affairs is very pleased to see that the action plan has considered the needs of communities. We applaud that step forward.
In helping us to prepare our testimony, one of the questions we were asked was whether certain sectors not in the action plan deserve particular attention.
For post-secondary education in French, the situation is troubling, Funding for the official languages in education program is frozen. Basically, it seems to have been frozen since 2003.
Simon Fraser University is a member of the Association des collèges et universités de la francophonie canadienne (ACUFC). Last April, we met in Moncton. We were able to work with the analysis of the action plan done by Ronald Bisson, who works as a consultant to the ACUFC. According to the table he showed us, funding for the program has been more or less frozen since 2003. He told us that federal investment in the official languages in education program comes to a total of $1.3 billion in Canadian dollars. That is a round figure per five-year cycle.
Since 1970, the official languages in education program has been a flagship program of the federal government in terms of official languages. The government’s demographic targets in the 2018-2023 action plan demand significant investments. The cost of living is increasing. We would like to know whether the government is taking this increase into account.
We also applaud the proposal to train future bilingual Canadians, which the action plan also contains. The plan proposes to promote a bilingual Canada, with a specific target of raising the bilingualism rate of English speakers outside Quebec from 6.8% to 9% by 2036.
But we ask this question: at which exact point in a school career do we consider a person to be bilingual? Is it in grade 8, grade 10, grade 12? Could we be more ambitious and also train people in French after their post-secondary studies?
In most Canadian provinces, we are facing a shortage of teachers. The same goes for the vast majority of federal government services provided in British Columbia. Our challenge is in recruiting bilingual staff. All those professionals have to be trained, and the priority would be to train them first at local level, in order to make it easier to retain them.
Training those professionals comes at a cost and requires investments. If the investments are frozen, it means difficulties in maintaining the programs currently in place in our universities in British Columbia, and perhaps elsewhere in Western Canada. There are also difficulties in developing programs, expanding the range of programs, and tailoring them to local situations.
We also have concerns about the two envelopes of $31,290,000. The first is to develop and support recruitment strategies for teachers in minority francophone schools. The second is to recruit immersion and French-as-a–second-language teachers. Do we have to hire teachers or train them? That is another question we have.
The Office of Francophone and Francophile Affairs believes that the action plan needs to be more ambitious, especially in terms of post-secondary education.
Thank you.