Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. You’ll be proud of us because we're going to give you a solution.
Good morning, everyone. My name is Alpha Barry. I'm from Saskatchewan, and I’m excited to be with you today.
Honourable members, first allow me to convey to you the best wishes of the Fransaskois school community. Thank you sincerely for answering the letter from the Conseil des écoles fransaskoises, the CEF, asking you to study the modernization of the act. Thanks as well for this opportunity to testify on behalf of the CEF.
I am here today because I very much want to see the Official Languages Act modernized, particularly with respect to official language minority education. Like Mr. Théberge, the Commissioner of Official Languages, we want a modern, dynamic and robust act.
Mr. Chair, the CEF welcomes all the efforts that have been made to promote linguistic duality, such as the promise to modernize the Official Languages Act, the new Action Plan for Official Languages 2018-2023: Investing in Our Future, future amendments to the regulations on services and the new initiatives on francophone immigration outside Quebec, as announced yesterday.
However, your committee is familiar with the problems of the minority francophone and Acadian school boards and the deficiencies of the act, which, for a long time now, you have constantly asked the federal government to amend. The time has now come to talk about modernizing the act in order to recognize and consider those governing bodies, the minority school boards, that were established under the minority's constitutional right.
I am delighted to be here to tell you about the critical needs of our communities. There can be no doubt that those communities require protection under the act. Unfortunately, my presentation today is too similar in content to the one the CEF made when it testified before the committee in 2011, which means, as you can readily imagine, that not much has changed since then.
The CEF is the only francophone school board in the province that has a threefold mandate: academic, cultural and community-related. As a minority board, the CEF has a constitutional obligation under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. It is responsible for managing francophone schools on behalf of stakeholder parents for the greater benefit of the Fransaskois community. The CEF takes this responsibility very seriously.
The CEF manages six minority schools in urban areas and nine in rural areas. These schools face separate challenges, which result in significant costs to the CEF, and there are no economies of scale. Under its standardized funding formula, Saskatchewan's Ministry of Education struggles to adapt to the unique needs of the linguistic minority. The CEF is therefore vastly underfunded, a situation that undermines the education-related services provided in its schools.
The Department of Canadian Heritage and the Council of Ministers of Education, Canada have signed a five-year memorandum of understanding. That MOU defines the main parameters of cooperation between the two orders of government respecting funding for minority language education and second-language instruction. Allow me to emphasize that this framework for managing federal financial support for minority language education contravenes the purpose of section 23 of the charter.
For the purposes of this presentation, the CEF has identified four deficiencies in that management framework that could be corrected by amending the act. First, the needs of the Fransaskois community as reflected in the MOU are determined by Saskatchewan, not the CEF. Second, the MOU does not require that Saskatchewan's Ministry of Education consult the CEF. Third, the MOU does not provide for adequate accountability mechanisms. Fourth, the MOU permits funding dedicated to education from kindergarten to grade 12 to be used to fund the essential costs of that education and not genuine additional costs.
As you may readily imagine, the underfunding of the CEF has extensively affected the quality of instruction and the development and vitality of the Fransaskois community. All the deficiencies identified today stem from an absence of any framework under the act for federal government intervention in minority language education.
The CEF did not exist in 1988, the year in which the act was last amended. Let us not make the mistake of adopting a new act that fails to consider the CEF and minority French-langage school boards.
The solution the CEF is proposing in order to remedy these observed deficiencies is to add a section to the act providing for and governing the federal government's role in minority language education. The first draft of this proposal appears on pages 17 and 18 of our brief. I do not propose to read it to you today, but I respectfully urge you to consider our proposed legislative amendment.
The CEF thanks you for the opportunity to present its concerns and solutions as part of your study on the modernization of the Official Languages Act.
Thank you.