When the funds are sent is a very important issue. I'd like to discuss two components of the process that are complementary.
Bilateral agreements on education last five years and are renewable. We began the renewal process when the last agreement expired on March 31, 2018. We are now in September 2018 and we still have no news about that dossier. There are two components to the process. First, a national protocol is negotiated by all of the provinces and territories. Then, once the national protocol has been agreed upon, negotiations begin with every province and territory.
Six months down the road, the Collège Éducacentre has still not received any funds, and I think that Canadian Parents for French and the Fédération des parents francophones de Colombie-Britannique are in the same boat. And so we have to find funding from another source to support our activities. These funds will probably be reimbursed, but we aren't sure of that. When the previous agreement was renewed, we had to wait 14 months before the funds arrived. Our pockets are not deep enough to wait that long.
Luckily we had access to funds in the area of health and health training. Today we are in month six, and we are submitting our proposal to Health Canada. We don't expect an agreement to be negotiated for a few months, and we think we are going to be forced to spend our funds. Let me explain that. Public servants will divide our overall subsidy into five parts and tell us that we must spend this or that amount. In February, they will probably tell us that we have two months to spend what should have been spent throughout the year. Indeed, unless things have changed, we don't have the right to carry over the unspent funds from one fiscal year to the next. Personally, I don't think this is the best way to use the funds that are provided to us.