Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you for inviting me today to give you my thoughts about the important study you have undertaken on funding for francophone post-secondary institutions.
I' d like to begin with two facts.
The first is that post-secondary institutions serving official language minority communities are in difficult if not dire straits. The second is that our institutions have for far too long been squeezed by the federal and provincial governments tossing the ball back and forth.
We are asking the federal government to fully assume its role as the defender of official languages and official language minority communities.
I' d like to say a few words about the University of Ottawa. We are the largest French and English bilingual University in Canada and the world, or at least we believe this to be the case. This year, we welcomed more than 49,000 students to our campus. Of these, 15,000 were enrolled in French-language programs. That's a significant number. We take pride in offering the largest number of university programs in French outside Quebec. Not only that, but over 80% of francophone university students in Ontario attend the University of Ottawa. That is indicative of our influence in the province of Ontario.
We offer university programs in French in every field in order to provide support to discrete and isolated francophone communities, whether in medicine, health, law or social work, not to mention engineering, natural sciences and, more recently, pharmaceutical sciences. It's extremely wide-ranging.
Even so, we are in a difficult financial position because of the chronic underfunding of our francophone mission. Last year, as you may be aware, the Ontario government established an expert panel to examine the financial viability of post-secondary institutions. In a brief to the expert panel, we clearly demonstrated that for every francophone student enrolled at the University of Ottawa, we receive approximately $3,000 less than other francophone or bilingual post-secondary institutions in the province. We further reported a shortfall of over $50 million a year for our francophone mission.
In its report, the expert panel mentioned our chronic underfunding, as well as underfunding for the whole network of Ontario francophone institutions. The Ontario government acted on all but one of the expert panel's recommendations, the one on funding for Ontario's francophone and bilingual institutions.
The province's strategy seems to be very straightforward: don't provide enough funding to meet the needs of the francophone post-secondary system and ask the federal government to make up the difference. Once again, we are being squeezed by the federal government and the Ontario government. That was four months ago.
What is the federal government's current role?
Allow me to try and answer that question. For over 25 years, despite the ranting of politicians who say that the federal government shouldn't intervene in provincial areas of jurisdiction, the federal government has been funding the post-secondary sector directly. For example, Health Canada provides millions of dollars to our university to help us train health professionals to ensure that there will be qualified workers in francophone communities across Canada. The Department of Justice does the same to ensure training for bilingual lawyers so that francophones have access to legal services in their language.
These direct interventions are of course made on grounds that the federal government has jurisdiction in matters like justice and health. We would also argue that the federal government has the same level of jurisdiction to protect Canada's linguistic minorities. Likewise, Parliament recognized this fact when it modernized the Official Languages Act last year. The importance of the education continuum is now enshrined in that act. It means that parliamentarians have acknowledged that the federal government needs to fully assume its role in support of official language minority communities. As is the case for health and justice, there is nothing to prevent the federal government from providing direct financial support to post-secondary institutions.
The matching provincial funds required by the federal government are, as we know, not always in evidence. That's the problem everyone is aware of, Mr. Chair, but no one wants to mention it.