In Alberta, 12% of rights holders attend francophone schools. For children aged zero to five, only 8% attend a pre-school of some kind.
In all of Alberta, early childhood education services in French provide 1,536 spaces and have 300 employees. The employees are an important component because by speaking French, they contribute to the French fact.
In fact, we expect to need an additional 1,500 employees in the next few years, which is a huge number. One of the solutions proposed is to focus on family child care centres. I will explain what the problem as I understand it is, however. When the federal government gave money to the early childhood education sector, it was meant for the entire sector, on both the anglophone side and the francophone side. Ultimately, that gave us about 15 spaces in francophone centres for all of Alberta.
Here, when we talk about a continuum in French, we need to have people to take the lead on the issue. When the federal government gives money to the provinces, it needs to determine who is the lead on the issue and how much money will be allocated to a specific sector. My own work relates more to the schools, but from what I am told, in the case of early childhood education, the big problem is that funding has not been given specifically for francophones in that case.