I am deeply grateful for the opportunity to appear here today and to address your committee.
First of all, allow me to thank you sincerely for your invitation. I am very pleased to testify as part of your study on the minority-language education continuum.
I would like to express my gratitude to the members of this committee for their commitment to the protection and promotion of Canada's official languages.
In acknowledging the importance of minority-language education programs, the federal government plays an essential role in sustaining our francophone community, which, as on Prince Edward Island, is a minority community.
First of all, I would like to underscore the close and positive co-operation we enjoy with the provincial government of Prince Edward Island. That co-operation is vitally important because it enables us to meet certain challenges that we face as a francophone minority community. Despite those good relations, we know that the challenges are many and our situation unique.
Access to funding from the official languages in education program, or OLEP, is one of the pillars of our survival. That program plays a key role in the development and preservation of French-language education in our province. To be clear, without this agreement, our francophone schools and community educational centres would not even exist.
Although the provincial government relies on principles of equality in assessing educational needs, the agreement with OLEP constitutes an essential framework in achieving equity. Thanks to this agreement, it is possible to adopt policies and resources in order to meet the specific needs of all students, thus contributing to a more equitable and inclusive educational system. This distinction is essential because equality means providing the same resources for everyone, whereas equity means adjusting those resources in accordance with the specific needs of each person. The difference is critically important in our case because our situation as a francophone minority community is a special one.
Many of our francophone schools are small and scattered across various parts of Prince Edward Island, and their mission far exceeds that of mere educational institutions. They are also community school centres, places where our children learn, but also where the community gathers to live in French. That mission entails unique logistical, organizational and pedagogical challenges that anglophone majority schools face very rarely or not at all.
The current funding formulas clearly put our members at a disadvantage, thus limiting their ability to provide our students with French-language instruction of quality equivalent to that offered to the anglophone majority and in immersion programs. Although our needs are growing, federal funding under the official languages in education program, or OLEP, is still not enough for the Commission scolaire de langue française de l'Île‑du‑Prince‑Édouard, the CSLF, for example, to guarantee equity with the majority language education system.
In the meantime, the cost of living is constantly rising, as is the number of students at our schools. This leaves us in a situation where it is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain the models of a high-quality francophone education.
Our francophone students, in many instances, are more geographically isolated, a fact that complicates the introduction of appropriate programs such as francization. This dispersion also makes it harder to recruit and retain teachers because the talent pool is small. As a result, efforts to achieve mere equality with anglophone schools disregard these facts. We need appropriate support, a model that acknowledges these challenges and that enables us to operate on an equal footing, and especially on an equitable model.
The restorative aspect of section 23 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms means that many rights holders enter our francophone schools with low levels of proficiency in French. Our teachers must therefore adjust curricula to include additional francization work. This requires increased individual support. This francization effort must be acknowledged because it means additional work for teachers and has a direct impact on the quality of the education that we offer our students.
To guarantee that all students receive the support they require to learn French, we need to be able to adjust funding ratios and criteria in accordance with our specific needs. It is essential that funding models reflect this unique situation because only by acknowledging these specific characteristics can we provide a high-quality education to our francophone students and ensure their academic and cultural success.
The fact that our francophone schools are scattered across Prince Edward Island makes our organization more complex. This logistical challenge weighs heavily on our ability to recruit both students and skilled teachers. The distance between homes and schools often undermines access to French-language education for certain families.
Bus travel, which can be long and restrictive, further complicates the situation. For some students, long daily bus rides are a major obstacle to their academic development.
