In their report, they indicate that they have actually spent, say, $11.5 million of the $12 million they were allocated and they tell us why there was a discrepancy.
I have here last year’s report from Ontario by way of an example. Their first commitment was to increase the number of students in French-language schools from 98,695 to 100,000. In the last report we have, for 2014-2015, the number of students is shown as 101,837. That shows, therefore, that the objective has already been met in the second year.
Ontario’s report covers all the targets that it set and all the commitments it made. That is how we are able to know whether provinces are making good progress in terms of their objectives. Of course, it is possible for a province to tell us along the way that the objective was too ambitious, that it is trying to achieve it, but is not able to and that it wants to revise things. In cases like that, we talk about it.
We are always very conscious of the fact that this is exclusively provincial jurisdiction and our role is one of support. We are not there to tell them what to do, but we still have good business-like discussions with them. That allows us to monitor their use of federal funds. So we are in a position to match that with their reports on how they have spent the money we have allocated to them in each of the areas of investment.
We have six areas of investment for minority schools, and those same six areas apply to investments in second-language learning. So we have 12 sections for those objectives. People assure us that they have spent the money in the areas they were supposed to.