Official Languages committee  Mr. Chair, members of the committee, my name is Lisa Marie Perkins, and I am the president of Canadian Parents for French. I'm accompanied today by my executive director, Robert Rothon, and we are very pleased to have the opportunity to present to you today. The road map for Ca

Official Languages committee  Mr. Chair, members of the committee, thank you for your question regarding the transparency of road map funding, or funding for official languages in the provinces. Across Canada we have, I would say, different degrees of success of being able to follow where the money goes, fro

Official Languages committee  Mr. Chair and members of the committee, the position of Canadian Parents for French is, first of all, that parents should have that choice. If in New Brunswick parents want immersion starting in grade 1, then that's the program that should be offered. We also have a lot of resear

Official Languages committee  Mr. Chair, members of the committee, I am from Red Deer, Alberta.

Official Languages committee  How can we foster bilingualism and consider economic development at the same time? We in Canadian Parents for French see that, in school systems and education ministries, we're very creative in terms of developing opportunities for children to be bilingual. Some of that is by wo

Official Languages committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. My thanks to the members of the committee. We were able to take part in a teleconference with members of the FSL Partner Network and with Heritage Canada representatives in order to evaluate the midterm successes of the roadmap.

Official Languages committee  Mostly, they were the same kinds of comments as the ones we have just made. Canadian Parents for French received two hundred thousand dollars from the road map directly. With that we produced, with the Commission nationale des parents francophones, a board game called Amuse-t

Official Languages committee  I will start the answer, Mr. Chair, but Mr. Rothon has all the statistical details about that. For Canadian Parents for French, two years ago the main focus of our research, as part of our state of French second language, was on allophones, and to what degree allophones—or peop

Official Languages committee  Thank you. We feel that you have to give parents and school systems the information they need to make the choice. I have many parents who come and ask me exactly that question of why French, why not Spanish, or why not Mandarin or something else. I think that has a lot to do wi

Official Languages committee  We have highlighted some very concrete examples in our brief. The one that I would highlight for you right now would be the development of proficiency benchmarking and a national standard for our youth in Canada, so that we understand what bilingual means and our students are abl

Official Languages committee  First we would like to see, at a minimum, that the French-language proficiency of our high school graduates be recognized at the university level, which it currently is not, unlike some other types of programs, and that it be celebrated so that our universities are actually using

Official Languages committee  Good morning, Mr. Chair, and to all of you respected committee members. Thank you for inviting Canadian Parents for French to attend these hearings on linguistic duality during the 150th anniversary celebrations of Canadian Confederation in 2017. On behalf of my board, which repr

Official Languages committee  We're very lucky to work very closely with our colleagues in organizations like French for the Future and Canadian Youth for French, who do a lot of work and exchanges, along with programs like Encounters with Canada. In our brief, we point out two things that are very interest

Official Languages committee  In my presentation on Canadian Parents for French, I indicated that we have a lot of experience in organizing pan-Canadian events for our youth across the country and in working with families. You must recognize that French is not the first language of most of the parents we d

Official Languages committee  Thank you, Mr. Dion. There are a few recommendations in our brief. Number one, we would like every celebration across the country to be bilingual, and not rely on the fact that certain communities.... I'll speak from Red Deer's perspective, and when we have Canada Day or a c