Significant challenges exist around staff training. Recruiting workers locally is no easy feat. There are major deficiencies on that front. I'm always talking to people at the RCMP, the Canada Revenue Agency, the Canada Border Services Agency and the like. We have programs aimed at training future public servants. At the university here, we have a basic French program, but only 20 or so students a year take it, so it's not enough to meet the needs of a professional population locally.
Retention is the challenge these government organizations come up against. You have bilingual government workers who come from out east—Ontario, Quebec or New Brunswick—but they don't stay in British Columbia for more than three or four years. They don't settle here long term for reasons as basic as money. What's the point of staying here three or four years if you can't buy an apartment and put down roots? It's especially important, then, to have the capacity to train workers locally to work out west, whether it be in British Columbia, Alberta, Manitoba or Saskatchewan.
The situation also has to do with the teacher shortage. They're intertwined. I nevertheless think it's important to train people here, in B.C., so people with the ability to work in both official languages stay here. That also ties in with the principle of providing education beginning in childhood. When immigrants come to B.C., they might easily wonder what the benefit of enrolling their children in a French-language school would be. They have those kinds of questions, what we call family politics.
Why would they bother registering their children in a French-language school when assimilation at all levels occurs regardless? It isn't limited to childhood. It also happens in adulthood. When people call a service provider in French in order to be served in French and yet are served in English, they wonder why they should bother further.