Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Thanks to the committee for having me, and greetings to Vice-Chairs Blaney and Beaulieu.
Thank you for inviting us to discuss access to postsecondary education in one's language, which is of the utmost importance for the vitality of the official language minority communities and especially for the Canadian francophonie.
In 1982, recognizing the fundamental role that schools played in the continued sustainability of the minority communities, the Canadian government saw fit to add to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms a right of access for stakeholders to education in the official language of one's choice, from kindergarten to grade 12x, or secondary 5 in Quebec. In 2021, it is now obvious that our society has changed and that those rights are now inadequate to meet the needs of our communities.
In particular, the qualifications expected in the labour market have changed over the past 40 years, and employers now expect their employees to have a higher level of education than previously. Workers now need higher-level diplomas and degrees in order to stay in the middle class. Consequently, more Canadians now attend postsecondary institutions than at the time the Charter was adopted.
In 1981, 37% of the Canadian population 15 years of age and over had a postsecondary diploma or degree. Today the figure has nearly doubled to 65%. As a result of this trend, which shows no sign of abating, minority language communities are now asking their respective provinces to create or, in certain instances, to protect postsecondary institutions where instruction is given in their language.
In other words, the needs of the official language minority communities now exceed the scope of section 23 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. That is also true of early childhood, which I will also be discussing with you today, as well as postsecondary education. To use the sociological terminology, the objective of communities today is to achieve institutional completeness in education, which would quarantee the members of those communities a complete education in their language regardless of the path they may choose to enter the labour market.
What happens when postsecondary education is not available close to home? By "close to home", I mean a distance of approximately 80 kilometers from the family home. A few studies conducted by the now-defunct Office of the French Language Services Commissioner of Ontario suggest some potential answers to this question. On the one hand, we see increasing numbers of minority school students gradually leaving their education system for majority schools starting in grade 8 x. The reason for that is simple: those students feel a need to succeed in English in the next phase of their education and therefore opt for instruction in that language to avoid losing out. The lack of access to postsecondary education in the minority language in a given region thus has an impact on the education system.
This decision also has a significant impact on community vitality because early adulthood is the time in life when an individual's identity becomes established. Young people who leave their community institutions during this phase will identify less closely with their community once they become adults. Individuals who pursue their secondary studies in the majority language are more likely to work in that language and to find themselves forming exogamous families, which, as we know, are major contributors to intergenerational language transfer. In short, we have long known that education is the lifeline of our communities.
That being said, our definition of education must now extend beyond what the Constitution prescribes as a response to the needs of our communities. However, postsecondary institutions are so fragile precisely because they are not protected by the Constitution, as we have very clearly seen in recent years. This may be due to inadequate investment over many years, as was the case with the Campus Saint-Jean and, less dramatically, the Université de Moncton and Université Sainte-Anne, or to the fact that French-language programs have been cut in order to save institutions, as was the case at Laurentian University.
Postsecondary education in the Canadian francophonie is currently in crisis, and the collapse of an institution such as Laurentian University clearly reveals the weakness of bilingual institutions, which strive to think and act in the minority community's interest. We realized years ago, in the case of primary and secondary schools, that the minority almost always suffers the consequences of the bilingual education model. It's time for us to take an independent approach— which we have previously established, practised and refined—from kindergarten to grade 12x. There's no doubt in my mind that the federal government has a role to play in this regard, one that it was already performing in part.
We must make sure that targeted, structural investment by the federal government isn't offset by a shirking of responsibility by the provinces. That's the central issue for us today.
I will stop there.
Thank you very much.