Thank you for that excellent question. It's extremely important for us.
As I said in my opening remarks, in an ideal world, the federal government should transfer money directly to the francophone school boards. People often say that education is a provincial or territorial jurisdiction, but this is also done in other jurisdictions, as we've previously seen. It's done in health, on the francophone side, and it's done with the municipalities. So I don't think it's impossible to do it in education.
If it's a complicated thing to do, we could split the budget of the official languages in education program. Immersion and French as a first language shouldn't have to share the same budget. Unfortunately, the provincial and territorial governments often use this as a way to divide the community. Other witnesses have said that, in many instances, some provinces allocate more funding to immersion than to French as a first language, while others provide more for French as a first language.
If the federal government divided that budget in two, it would be easy: money would go to institutions that teach French as a first language and to immersion education institutions. No one would be able to change that. That's what we recommend.