Thank you very much, Madam Chair.
First, I would like to greet the members of the committee and to thank them for allowing me to speak today.
Since 2015, when I joined the Campus Saint-Jean, which is located in Edmonton, Alberta, I have had a chance to discover the western francophonie, which is complex and pluralistic, and to work in a francophone research setting that is both vibrant and precarious.
The main point of my remarks today is this: no French-language research is possible without healthy francophone post-secondary institutions. However, that research contributes to an understanding of the complex nature of Canadian society.
As noted in the preface to the report published by Acfas entitled, "Portrait et défis de la recherche en français en contexte minoritaire au Canada", more than 30,000 of us, professors, lecturers teaching and research assistants at the post-secondary level, speak French and work in a minority setting in Canada. However, lacking recognition, financial support, administrative support and access to research assistants, we francophone researchers are all too often invisible and forced to reject our language and identity and dissolve into the anglophone mass. This assimilation has thus become a strategy and the only possible path to access to the same privileges as our anglophone colleagues receive, such as research support, the revision of grant applications and access to funding and prestigious awards.
Research in French, which plays an essential role in the vitality of francophone communities, is not always valued as it should be, by which I mean valued as research that is relevant and written in one of the country's official languages, that often focuses, though not exclusively, on specific issues experienced by the francophone minority communities and that serves as a basis for adopting informed public policies that meet the needs of those communities.
At the moment, this research is severely compromised by the tenuous state in which the colleges and universities of the Canadian francophonie find themselves. It is a condition that I know well because the Campus Saint-Jean has been in crisis for the past few years.
In 2020, when the University of Alberta was forced to respond to unprecedented budget cuts imposed by the provincial government, it undertook an extensive restructuring, in the initial scenarios of which the Campus Saint-Jean was to be shut down. My francophone colleagues and I had to turn to other faculties. It was a major loss for the broader francophone community. The Campus Saint-Jean is central to the francophone community and drives its vitality. Thanks to citizen and political action across the country, the University of Alberta was forced to review its restructuring scenarios and chose to preserve the Campus Saint-Jean in toto.
However, constant resistance is required to achieve a desired result. Unfortunately, the Campus Saint-Jean wasn't the only institution to take a major hit. I'm thinking of Laurentian University, which suffered an enormous loss when its French-language programs were cut; of the Université de Moncton, which has financial problems and had to raise students' tuition fees, which restricted access to postgraduate studies for francophones; of the University of Sudbury, which is striving to become the francophone university that meets the needs of francophones in northern Ontario; and of the Université de l'Ontario français, which experienced hard times when it was established.
These major shocks were caused by the chronic underfunding of post-secondary education and a misunderstanding of the special role those institutions play and of the additional costs necessary to achieve their objectives, which go to the heart of the vitality of the minority communities. These aren't merely institutions that contribute to the transmission of knowledge and learning; they are also cultural pillars that enable life in French to go on. I'm thinking of the Campus Saint-Jean, its theatre and its choir. It truly is a gathering place.
To conduct research in French, researchers must be able to aspire to a certain stability and to project themselves into the future. However, that stability is currently nonexistent. How can we attract students who will train the next generation of researchers at institutions whose very existence is in question?
However, every day as I pursue my career, I see the benefits of this research and the major role it plays, particularly for the next generation, in combating linguistic insecurity, the phenomenon eating away at minority communities.
I am thinking, for example, of the case of one student who drew on her rich francophone family archives to tell the story of her grandmother, who founded the small village of Plamondon. That student was one of the first generation to reconnect with French, after two generations that had been assimilated for lack of access to education in French.