Thank you for your question, Mr. Dalton.
Let's take a step back. We're taking part in a societal project that involves having a francophone society across Canada. We, the post‑secondary institutions, are part of the education continuum, so we have a role to play. Twenty years ago, we began funding institutions through the OLEP and action plans. Everyone here knows that it takes four or five years to obtain a bachelor's degree, two or three years to obtain a master's degree and three or four years to obtain a doctorate.
When you offer a program like the French cohort at Simon Fraser University, where your child studied, you have to hire associate professors, and those contracts are renewed. For there to be a student life, we want programming spread out over five or ten years. So we have to start thinking about post‑secondary education in French in a minority setting, just as we think about the school system, francophone school boards and kindergarten. This is a multi‑year deployment. We can't think that a bachelor's degree in French is a five‑year project and then simply evaluate it and close the project.
As I said earlier, we have to take a leap of faith or make some kind of commitment to SFU. In fact, very concretely, committee members, it's April 15 and I have no more money. We've exhausted the funds that were granted to us under the OLEP, because the transitional year ended on March 31. SFU is saying that it will receive funding retroactively.
That's just one example. I'm not complaining, but this creates instability that makes it extremely difficult to plan post‑secondary programming in French.
So let's be a little more serious. Let's try to put in place a national action plan for the entire education continuum. I think it will yield results.