Citizenship and Immigration committee  Okay. So there is no consistency between the reasons for refusal and the messages that the promotion teams ask us to advertise overseas. As we started to discuss a little earlier with Mr. Brunelle Duceppe, we also have to make the network of institutions better known to the federal public service, so that there are no more occasions when an application to a course of study in one of our institutions is considered not to be credible.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Our member institutions do not provide us with that data. Our institutions do their own recruitment in the field and support some students. We do not have that distinction between the programs that are used to try to accelerate the arrival of international students.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Thank you for your question. As I was saying, for us, this significant refusal rate of study permits for applicants from Africa is a situation that our member institutions have been observing for at least the last 15 or so years. We have heard anecdotal evidence that some applications were refused because officers decided that the choice to study in French outside of Quebec was not a legitimate pathway and that there was cause to doubt the veracity of the students' intentions.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Thank you. Good afternoon, Madam Chair and members of the committee. The Association des collèges et universités de la francophonie canadienne, or ACUFC, represents 22 francophone or bilingual post‑secondary institutions located in eight provinces. Our international activities are carried out in three phases, including marketing positioning, supporting the recruitment of international clients, and reaching out to federal institutions with international mandates to promote the reality of our network of institutions.