Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I will come back to the question of costs, which my colleague Mr. Godin raised. While the government is committed to using all possible tools to obtain the information needed to deliver the services, this comes at a cost. Even if an estimate were made by Statistics Canada based on the information provided by the provinces, with no guarantee that they would want to provide it, it would be too late. The school boards would be too late in providing this data and Statistics Canada would be too late in releasing its statistics. It would be too late to provide the necessary French-language services in French-language schools in anglophone provinces and English-language services in anglophone communities in Quebec.
If there is a political will to use all the necessary tools, children will have to be enumerated practically at birth, because budgets take time to prepare. At the rate things are going here, children aged 0 to 5 have time to get to university before pre-school services are provided. That is the reality. We must not rely on any provincial tool. We have everything we need at the federal level.
If we are able to send a cheque to every family with a one-month-old child, we should be able to find out whether the parents intend to send the child to a French- or an English-language school. This would not infringe on any provincial jurisdiction. That may be the tool we need. It would give us a number to forecast. Based on the number of births in 2024, for example, we would have an idea of the number of children who would need French-language school services in 2029. We would know this at least five years in advance.
However, if we rely solely on tools and estimates, these children will be in university before we know whether they would have preferred to go to school in English or in French, or whether they were not even able to make that choice, because the French-language schools in the other provinces were full, which is already the case.
So we can't make estimates, because of the costs involved. If the government is committed to using all the tools, it is committed to finding the right number. If there is enough will, we can absolutely do it. However, if we want to tread water, let's leave things vague, and they will remain vague for another 50 years.