Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Mr. Chair and members of the committee, thank you for the opportunity to speak today on this topic, which is also important to us.
I have been working at the Conseil des écoles fransaskoises, or CEF, for a little over 10 years. The continuum, from early childhood to post-secondary education, is a fundamental pillar for the linguistic and cultural vitality of our francophone minority communities in Canada.
In Saskatchewan, the survival of French depends on an integrated, accessible and quality education system, from pre-kindergarten to post-secondary education. A number of systemic barriers persist. They create significant problems for the system's proper functioning. I'm thinking in particular of underfunding.
I'll go over the historical context.
For nearly a century, teaching French was illegal in Saskatchewan, and that created a historic and profound harm in the Saskatchewan community.
Section 23 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms recognizes the right to education in the minority language and imposes an obligation on the provincial and federal governments to guarantee substantive equivalence for the children of rights holders.
Under Saskatchewan's Education Act, 1995, we have the exclusive responsibility to offer French first-language education. However, this responsibility is sometimes exercised within a legislative and administrative framework that, de facto, strongly favours majority schools. That reproduces the structural inequalities, which have been denounced for several decades.
Early childhood is an essential link in the continuum, and it must not be overlooked. However, it is sometimes neglected. Early childhood is also a recognized but unfunded linguistic vulnerability.
French-language linguistic development plays a pivotal role, an essential role. In Saskatchewan, most of our programs for pre-kindergarten 3 and pre-kindergarten 4—for children aged three and four—are not funded, and the programs for five-year-olds are funded only on a part-time basis. Since this program is offered on a full-time basis, that creates problems. Those children sometimes have language vulnerabilities. We're missing those vulnerabilities on the pre-kindergarten-to-kindergarten side of things, which costs a lot more in the future. It's also a huge loss for our communities.
I will now talk about capitalization. We have a number of schools and communities. Among our 12 communities, a number of infrastructure projects are not currently funded. We are aiming for access to local schools, which would reduce the distance to travel to school and provide accessible services to our rights holders.
Census data show that there are more than 11,000 rights holders. We have only 20% of them in our schools, which is also a pretty significant harm. Therefore, we ask that these measures be corrected.
The continuum is weakened, which is also the case at the post-secondary level. Once students finish their studies in the system, they need to hope to be able to find their way into the core post-secondary program. As far as this component is concerned, this lack of adapted post-secondary programming creates challenges. We see many young people leaving the Franco-Saskatchewanian community and going elsewhere, which further weakens our communities.
Here are some recommendations I would like to submit to the committee.
You know that the Conseil des écoles fransaskoises is always ready to work, and we thank you for all the steps that have been taken under part VII of the Official Languages Act, more specifically section 41.
Our goal is really to fully exercise the power conferred by this provision—that is to say the spending power to support the effective implementation of section 23 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
More specifically, the CEF recommends that the federal government be able to initiate and directly announce projects to build or expand French-language schools in minority communities. The CEF requests this without relying on a prior request from the provincial government, when the data show the following: a sufficient number of rights holders confirmed by Statistics Canada; a situation of overcrowding, obsolescence or the absence of local schools; or a cumulative delay in the implementation of section 23.
This approach is based on subsection 41(1) of the Official Languages Act, which requires the Government of Canada to enhance the vitality of official language minority communities and support their development, and subsection 41(2), which requires federal institutions to take positive measures to implement that commitment.