I certainly subscribe to the commissioner's recommendation. We have to invest in our communities. For the smaller communities, we will likely have to support the school boards through the schools. I know there is shared federal-provincial jurisdiction here.
We have to find ways, through the OLEP and other programs, to create spaces in French for children, starting in early childhood. Even for exogamous families—where one parent speaks French and the other speaks English—, day care is obviously an important place for language development and especially for the survival of the language in order to access French-language education. I always say that, in Ontario, if we mess up public policies on early childhood education for francophones, we will lose our constitutional rights through the back door.
I am tremendously concerned about that. That is why when the commissioner says that we should invest in early childhood to support—
Let us recall that, in minority communities, English is dominant; we have to work against that. Mr. Landry, a researcher from the University of Moncton, always said that spaces to live in French have to be created. These spaces also help the anglophone community interested in learning a second language. It is an investment not only for the minority, but also for the majority who want to learn French. Those people are called francophiles. Mr. Boissonnault used the term “franco-curious”, which I like very much. I will use it without his permission.
This is crucially important.