Official Languages committee  I have just a point of information.

Official Languages committee  The articles are all typed in Microsoft Word. I sent them as I originally typed them, before publication, so they should be available to everybody in French and English.

Official Languages committee  In some ways it was a step forward because we enjoyed the same right as other francophone minorities across the country, but in other ways it's a step back because there used to be more interaction as Catholics. Now it's this is the English side, that is the French side. I woul

Official Languages committee  Okay. I'm not advocating throwing out the baby with the bathwater. I've come to you with a proposal. Based on what we've seen with the program in the past, yes, it has brought some favourable judgments that have benefited the English community, but we think there are problems.

Official Languages committee  My point is that we used to have some integrated Catholic institutions. Then we had enough English Catholics to have separate Catholic English institutions, and you've seen the results. I am the result. I grew up in the town of Mount Royal. When I was a kid, it was a mostly an

Official Languages committee  Yes, some. It's hard.

Official Languages committee  It's much harder than French.

Official Languages committee  Well, I have. That's the thing. I'm a graduate of a Quebec high school. I passed the French leaving exams, and yet the only reason I can speak as much French as I can—I've lost some after being in Japan—is that I took a year at the Université de Montréal and I spent my own money

Official Languages committee  Please keep in mind that we got a call a few days ago to present, so I used an article that talks about the principle of integration. I don't want to be overly focused on the vehicle for integration. This could be done many ways. Simply, I've met with the people who've run some

Official Languages committee  I appreciate that. But at this point, a lot of the evidence is still anecdotal. I teach English to francophones as well, and I'm shocked at how many francophones cannot progress professionally because they don't have enough English. So maybe if there was more English in their sch

Official Languages committee  Sure, obviously instruction need not be restricted only to the two official languages. I just recently came back from living in Japan for seven years. It's become a smaller world. The chances of everyone's children here living and working in another country increase every year,

Official Languages committee  No, no, this was very clear. We were not adequately educated in English schools in Quebec to compete in our market. We don't want that problem to happen to subsequent generations. We're saying, why can't you take kids from English and French schools and maybe put them in a comm

Official Languages committee  Even in our group, there's nobody who's saying that the right to have a separate English school system should be overturned. Nobody's saying that. We're just saying that we would like to have the.... For example, an integrated school was never even conceived of when the Constitu

Official Languages committee  As I mentioned, from what we've seen of the court challenges program, often it supports one point of view. Already, now, you see the beginning of different points of view on integrated schools. Obviously we have some support across the political spectrum in Quebec. Some people ha

Official Languages committee  We have written in our article in the Gazette--which has been translated into French—that it would be mostly in French, but with strong second language schooling in English. Our idea is that by segregating these people, you are asking for future problems down the road. Even now,