Mr. Chair, vice-chairs and members of the committee, thank you for having me here today to discuss funding for minority French-language post-secondary institutions.
I'd like to draw your attention to the federal government's new obligations under Part VII of the Official Languages Act and, above all, to how they will be implemented. I will focus my remarks on three factors: sharing jurisdiction, making funding sustainable and strengthening our institutions.
First, although post-secondary education is now explicitly named in the act as a crucial driver of vitality in our communities, first and foremost it remains a provincial jurisdiction. So I believe it's essential for the federal government to come to an agreement with the provinces to ensure that federal funding remains supplementary funding and that it does not result in proportionate divestment from minority institutions by the provinces, which would take us back to square one. Funding must also be provided at the agreed-upon time, so that institutions can properly manage their resources. Finally, the funding granted must adequately address the needs of the institutions that serve our communities, which means they must participate in federal-provincial negotiations.
As we've known for a long time, the official languages in education program is a frankly imperfect funding distribution tool that allows abuses by some provinces, which reallocate funds for core funding or fail to take community priorities into account in the way they spend the funds. Let's try to learn from our mistakes and make sure that the public funds spent on post-secondary education will be put to good use.
Second, to make a difference, this funding will need to be sustainable. A solid foundation in post-secondary education can't be built on a project-by-project basis. We can't set up laboratories or programs that will have a real impact if we're not sure we'll have the funding to keep them going for more than four or five years.
It would also be hard to talk about funding without mentioning the issue of international students. With all due respect to Minister Miller, the Canadian francophonie's institutions are not largely responsible for the abuses of the system we're witnessing. They're not the bad actors, and yet they're punished just as severely as other institutions. Worse still, the minister's decision not to make these institutions exempt from permit caps goes against his department's priorities based on the francophone immigration policy.
Let's also assume that if we gave francophone institutions the means to be as competitive in the post-secondary education market as the majority institutions, they would need less supplementary funding from the federal government. I commend the members of the Association des collèges et universités de la francophonie canadienne for the complaint they filed with the Office of the Commissioner of Official Languages on this matter. I don't want to put myself in Commissioner Théberge's shoes, but I sincerely hope that he will find the complaint to be founded.
Finally, the new version of Part VII of the Official Languages Act and the action plan for official languages 2023-2028 both mention the need to protect and promote the community's strong institutions. I invite you to start thinking about the indicators that will determine what exactly constitutes a strong post-secondary institution. This terminology raises concerns for some of our existing institutions, which could hardly be described as strong since they are weakened by a chronic lack of funding, among other things. However, these institutions are necessary because they are often the only ones in their community to offer training in French.
How will the new version of the act take into account their reality on the ground, including their multiple governance arrangements, among other things, since some of our institutions are not homogenous francophone or fully independent institutions? Take, for example, the Office of Francophone and Francophile Affairs affiliated with Simon Fraser University or Glendon College, which is affiliated with York University.
In short, I feel we need to think about how we will determine who deserves funding and for what reasons in order to truly support the development of francophone minority communities.
Thank you. I look forward to discussing these issues with you.