Thank you for inviting the Association des conseils scolaires des écoles publiques de l'Ontario, ACEPO, of which I am president. I am accompanied by our executive director, Isabelle Girard. I am also the outgoing president of the Fédération nationale des conseils scolaires francophones, which has already shared with you an opinion that is very similar to mine. I am a retired professional engineer.
ACEPO represents French-language public school boards in Ontario. It manages 140 schools and offers quality education programs in French. Bill C‑13 is a step in the right direction, but concrete and realistic amendments are needed so we can achieve our common goal of ensuring the sustainability and vitality of French and its cultures.
We need effective coordination without duplication. We need positive measures, which are required and not just appropriate, in order to achieve this. Today, we are asking for a very specific amendment, one we have asked for in the past. You will find it at tab 1 of the binder you received.
ACEPO members should be managing many more schools in order to provide French-language education to many more students. However, securing available land to build schools is a significant challenge to implementing section 23 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The federal government owns a multitude of sites that it routinely disposes of, but it does not offer these sites to our members. All too often, our members learn too late, and too frequently from the media, that a site has been sold. One solution is to give French-language school boards a chance to acquire at market value—we are not asking for money—federal sites that are put up for sale.
In 2018, your committee went to Vancouver and discovered the same problem. For more than 20 years, the school board has not been able to build a school west of Main Street for lack of a site. The federal government implemented a disposal process that would meet the needs of this school board. The process began in 2005, but the school board still does not have a school west of Main Street.
These problems exist across the country. For that reason the committee recommended in 2019 that the Official Languages Act include “a provision ensuring that the educational and cultural infrastructure needs of official language minority communities are identified as a priority in the Government of Canada's disposal process for surplus real property”. Unfortunately, Bill C‑13 is silent on that point.
Mr. Chair, you signed that report. Mr. Généreux, you signed that report. Mr. Samson, you signed that report. The Honourable Mona Fortier also signed that report. I mention it because, as the President of the Treasury Board, she has the discretionary authority, but not the obligation, to improve the directive on the disposal of real property.
The directive in effect since 2006 specified that when disposing of real property, federal institutions were to consider the interests of communities, including official language minority communities. Despite that, school boards were ignored. Therefore, many of them have called for the Official Languages Act to be amended so that it expressly gives school boards a right of first refusal for federal sites subject to disposal.
The directive was amended last year. You would think that would be a good thing. However, the changes did not improve the directive. What I mentioned earlier was included in the 2006 directive, but it has disappeared. Now federal institutions only have an obligation to inform official language communities that they intend to dispose of a site. They are not required to inform them of when or how.