I'm going to refer back to Margo again. I'll give you two examples, both taken from the study that we recently completed. The first one is that on paper it says that we have referral lines in Quebec, Info-Alpha and Info Apprendre, which are supposed to be bilingue. They're bilingual referral lines. They are supported by the Government of Quebec, by the Ministère de l'Éducation et de l'Enseignement supérieur, and run through the Fondation pour l'alphabétisation, the literacy foundation. They have English on their website. When you call you can get English messages and they're supposed to be referring you to more than 600 centres that provide services across the country.
We actually called the director of services there because we wanted to ask in the year preceding this one how many referrals they made through Info-Alpha, which is people at the alpha level. Info Apprendre is adult education more generally. So it could be adult education up to university, CEGEP, etc. They came back to us and said that of 886 calls they had referred from Info-Alpha from April 1, 2016, to March 31, 2017, 7% were from anglophones. That translates to 62, and he could not say where they were referred to. He thought they were referred to community organizations, which would have been members of Margo's group, the 13 groups.
I spoke to Margo; she was one of our informants and so were eight of the executive directors. Margo collects data every year from her members, and I asked her, how many did your referrals did your members receive last year from Info-Alpha? She said none. I confirmed this on the way in because I wanted to be sure because it's in my written report and it's in here as well.
I asked them about Info Apprendre. From Info Apprendre, of 1,863 calls during the year 16% were from anglophones, which translates to 298, and they could not say where they were referred. They just said they were referred to appropriate services, but they couldn't track where they were referred to and could not speak to the agencies they were referred to. In the case of the community organizations we could check because they collect that data. So that's one instance.
The other instance probably relates to the network that Margo was talking about, because one of the things that I discovered in talking to the executive directors was that their websites list a large number of activities and services that they offer. I said, “this is very exciting what you're offering”. It turns out that in fact they can offer very few of those activities for the very reasons that Margo outlined, they don't have enough resources to do it. So she said they list all the activities they could potentially offer or ever have offered, but they don't offer more than two or three of them in a year and it depends on the needs of the community.
The other thing that I guess was not clear was how many of these services were being offered to adults. The core funding that Margo referred to is offered to community organizations without a lot of strings attached. It's to pursue their own mission, and their mission can be directed to the needs of the community. Again, a number of these organizations were actually offering services such as after-school programs for children, support to youth in the community. Not all of them were offering services to adults, some of them were. Some of them offered workshops once or twice a year because the numbers who came to workshops augmented the numbers that they could report back, because that's one of the measures they report back. Those are maybe two examples.
Does that give you a little bit of a sense of what it means? On paper if you look at it you'd say, these are amazing services, look, they've got these 13 organizations that are core funded and they're offering all of these activities and services. You'd say, look at this they have a referral service that refers people to their services, but the reality is that it doesn't happen. This is true, by the way, of the employability centres as well. There was a study conducted this year not by us, but by youth employment services, looking at the employability centres in Quebec. Of 158 of them, only a small number had the capacity to provide bilingual services.