Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thanks as well to the members of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Official Languages for inviting me to appear before the committee.
Campus Saint-Jean was founded in 1908. It is an integral part of the University of Alberta, has been a faculty of that institution since 1977 and plays a fundamental and growing role in Alberta and in western and northern Canada. The campus is the only French-language institution west of Winnipeg that offers a broad range of college-level programs at the baccalaureate level and in graduate-level business administration, the humanities and social sciences, education, the natural and physical sciences, nursing, speech therapy and engineering.
Campus Saint-Jean thus plays a fundamental role in maintaining the vitality of the francophone minority community. In many respects, it is the cultural hub of the traditional French-language community in Alberta and the entire west, as well as the growing communities of new francophone immigrants and young students from French immersion programs wishing to pursue their education in French in a country whose linguistic duality they largely consider a fact and essential to their future.
In the 1976 agreement signed by the Province of Alberta, the University of Alberta and the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, the owners of Collège Saint-Jean, the three parties, with the sponsorship of the Government of Canada, undertook to provide funding to ensure the continued existence and growth of Campus Saint-Jean.
Since the 2000s, however, the campus has experienced permanent and growing financial instability. Whether the situation arose in 2003, when transfers were frozen under the official languages in education program, or OLEP, as the Association des collèges et universités de la francophonie canadienne, or ACUFC, asserted in its presentation to the Standing Senate Committee on Official Languages, or in 2009, as noted in the report of the Commissioner of Official Languages, the fact remains that the situation of Campus Saint-Jean is nevertheless critical.
There are at least four reasons for this situation.
The first is the quota the University of Alberta sets for Campus Saint-Jean. Although the quota is currently 575 full-time equivalents, we now have 750, and an actual head count shows that we have more than 1,000 students. The quota thus imposes a limit on us because it reduces our operating budget.
The second reason is the dilly-dallying over federal-provincial agreements, which are always too late in materializing. For example, the last Alberta-Canada agreement was signed two years late. Although federal funding represents approximately 30% of Campus Saint-Jean's operating budget, the University of Alberta authorizes the institution to hire contract personnel only, not professors, to fill tenure-track positions on the federal portion of its budget.
The third reason is changes in federal funding. Since 2003 or 2009, depending on the analysis you accept, that funding has been shifted from providing support for core programs to special projects, as my colleague Denis Prud'homme previously mentioned. While this funding is definitely appealing, it also causes growing imbalances that jeopardize the institution and its operation. As a result, the federal government has stated in its action plan that it wishes to support the training and retention of teachers in francophone schools and French immersion programs. Campus Saint-Jean, of course, welcomes this, but while it expands its master's training programs in three regions of Alberta—Calgary, Red Dear and Grande Prairie—thanks to this targeted funding, it is required to hire contract personnel at the very moment it finds itself having to reduce its overall course offerings and is unable to replace permanent professors, who either retire or are hired by other universities. As a result, Campus Saint-Jean's faculty has declined from 33 to 28 professors in the past two years, whereas we would have between 42 and 45 if we had a normal-sized faculty.
The fourth reason is the province's obligation to provide matching funding. With regard to programming, the Alberta government feels it has already already done enough by contributing to initial core funding and therefore contributes nothing to matching funding and has refused for some time now to pay anything for infrastructure.
In closing, if I may, I would say my main concern is the crucial issue of international francophone students, particularly from Africa, who are particularly hard hit by this situation.
Thank you for your attention.