Thank you for the opportunity to discuss my recommendations.
First, the government should contribute to the long-term funding of post-secondary institutions in francophone communities across Canada. As my colleague Éric Forgues said, education is a provincial jurisdiction, but the federal government can still intervene, particularly in official languages. In many instances, institutions can secure funding through federal-provincial partnerships. That's the case in Alberta and Ontario. We now find ourselves in situations where provinces are genuinely reluctant to cooperate, and we need to find a way to overcome that reluctance by establishing programs.
The funding received shouldn't be used solely to stamp out fires, but also to project into the future, to hire new professors and to establish the next generation. That's what currently troubles me most. How can we conduct research in French if we don't replace existing positions? How can we conduct research in French if there's no next generation of researchers and the only way to continue in the research sector is to switch to English, which exacerbates assimilation?
Another of my recommendations would be to support the Service d'aide à la recherche en français, or SARF, which Acfas has established. As my colleagues Linda Cardinal and Éric Forgues said, researchers wishing to conduct research in French face many barriers along the way, in particular a lack of access to revision of their applications. Research in French is a highly competitive sector. If, tomorrow morning, I submitted an application in French for a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council to my university, the University of Alberta, no one would be there to revise it. On the other hand, if a colleague wants to submit a similar application in English, he'll be surrounded by experts who can assist him and offer him recommendations. So there's a considerable discrepancy between those services.
Lastly, I recommend that we send out a strong message about the legitimacy of research in French, and that can be done in various ways. It starts with the support of Bill C‑13. We must also encourage departments to use research in French to gain a clearer understanding of the specific needs of francophone communities. We can also send a strong message by establishing a program of Canadian francophone chairs and by supporting francophone and bilingual scientific journals. We must also support a student exchange program. Our students currently go on exchanges with students from Belgium and France, but they should also have exchanges with students from Acadie and Manitoba. There is a wealth of resources that can be used to understand the francophonie better. Lastly, the major research councils must be made aware of the challenges involved in research in French at francophone minority institutions, which, in many instances, are small institutions where students are not trained in French at the master's or doctoral level. Francophone researchers therefore don't have access to those students, who could act as research assistants, a fact that penalizes them relative to anglophone researchers, who are surrounded by master's and doctoral students who support them in their research.