Proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on
Official Languages
Issue 11 - Evidence - Meeting of May 28, 2012
OTTAWA, Monday, May 28, 2012
The Standing Senate Committee on Official Languages met this day at 5:02 p.m. to examine the use of the Internet, new media and social media and the respect for Canadians' language rights.
Senator Maria Chaput (Chair) in the chair.
[Translation]
The Chair: Welcome to our meeting of the Standing Senate Committee on Official Languages. I am Senator Maria Chaput, from Manitoba, Chair of the committee.
Before I introduce the witnesses appearing today, I would like to invite the members of the committee to introduce themselves.
Senator Fortin-Duplessis: I am Senator Suzanne Fortin-Duplessis, from the Quebec City region.
Senator Poirier: I am Senator Rose-May Poirier, from New Brunswick.
Senator Losier-Cool: I am Senator Rose-Marie Losier-Cool, from New Brunswick.
Senator Ringuette: I am Senator Pierrette Ringuette, from New Brunswick.
[English]
The Chair: The committee continues its study on the use of the Internet and social media and respect for Canadians' language rights. It will hear today from a local English-language newspaper as part of this study. It is a pleasure to welcome Mr. Jim Duff, Editor, and Ms. Louise Craig, Publisher of the Hudson St. Lazare Gazette.
On behalf of the members of the committee, I thank both of you for appearing today. You now have the floor, and senators will follow with questions.
Jim Duff, Editor, Hudson St. Lazare Gazette: We are here to talk about our perspective on the Internet and how we see our little world connecting with the rest of it. For those of you who are not familiar with weekly newspapers, we publish a weekly newspaper for a region called Vaudreuil-Soulanges. It is expanding. Vaudreuil-Dorion has expanded 29 per cent since the 2006 Census. From 2006 to 2011 it has jumped from 25,000 to 33,000 people.
We serve those people with a weekly regional newspaper in English, but we also serve a huge diaspora of former residents of our original core community, which is called Hudson-St. Lazare. Collectively, Hudson has about 5,300 people and St. Lazare has about 19,000. The diaspora is probably three times that size. It is a transient population that moves in and out. The anglophones are more transient than the French-speaking counterparts. They come, live for a while, and move on. They are very flexible. They see Hudson and St. Lazare as a kind of spiritual home, a place where they have always had roots, always will have roots, a place they would like to return to for retirement and so on. Many do come back to retire.
We have become a virtual community as well as a real community. The real community is about 50,000 English speakers of a region called Vaudreuil-Soulanges, which has just over 130,000 people now. About 35 or 40 per cent are English speaking.
As a weekly newspaper, one of our problems is to find the critical mass to serve both that virtual and real community that we publish to every week, which is easy. In the real community, it is on paper. It is printed. It is available. However, for a virtual community, you have to build a habit. People come to the Internet because they know they will find something they are looking for. They will come back on a weekly or daily basis. However, if you do not supply it on a daily basis, do not try to pretend that you can supply them a daily content. The Web is strange that way. You cannot promise what you cannot deliver. You will suffer. Your core product will suffer if you do not deliver.
One of the problems we have had is how far we go in developing a Web presence.
We have a website and we have a Facebook page. We are not going to get into Twitter. We even find Facebook difficult to maintain. When I started blogging in radio in Montreal five or ten years ago once a day was plenty. Today, it is five or ten times a day. I have colleagues at La Presse who blog every hour. We cannot begin to do that. We do not have the staff.
We have to be careful in not promising to our virtual community what we cannot deliver, literally, on paper. How far do you go? The publisher and I have been talking about this. It is just not feasible to become more of a presence than you can reasonably supply.
Louise Craig, Publisher, Hudson St. Lazare Gazette: The beauty of using the Internet, the Web, when you are talking about community newspapering, is that we can access any information as quickly need be to the readers. If there is an accident, something to do with water contamination or a problem with one of the schools, we can immediately post the information. It is not a problem for us to post it in French or in English. I know this has to do with language when it comes to the Web, but that is such a complicated issue when you start looking at language. How do you police language when it comes to the Web? There are almost a billion sites in the world right now. Can you possibly monitor where the information is coming from at this point?
If a website is uploaded in another country for you here, which is very possible, who controls that? Is it the country here? Is it the country it is posted from? The beauty of something that would be in French or in English is if you were to have some information in Quebec that is mandated or regulated by Bill 101, we have the ability, through an English newspaper, of publishing that resource information in English, and it is a real problem. It is a serious problem. Our regional board, the MRC, represents 23 municipalities, and I am their representative when it comes to health and social services. A lot of those services are not available in English. The law mandates that they should be, but the law is only where services are available. If the services are not available, through no fault, just because the staff is not bilingual, would it not be nice to have a reference centre that can do this in English? This is what we are able to do. We are able to give them that information. It gives us that opportunity to do so. I think it would be difficult to mandate one as being French or English. That becomes very difficult to do.
[Translation]
Senator Fortin-Duplessis: I am happy to hear that the English-speaking population in your region has increased significantly. I also think it is wonderful that you promote English-speaking activities in your region as much as possible. In other words, you are bridging the two cultures. You make it your responsibility to publish high-quality information, in English, about social and political activities.
Though I should not be asking you this, I have a question that follows on your previous appearance before the committee. You said you were facing big challenges in terms of distribution and competition with the major newspaper chains. Has the situation improved?
Ms. Craig: The situation is still there and it will continue to exist. It is clear that there is a debate between Transcontinental and Quebecor. It is a matter of finding out who will hold onto the publishing and distribution markets. They are either creating competition that did not used to be there in the past, or they are buying newspapers to have competition.
Will newspaper publishing as we know it continue to exist? It is hard to tell. In the U.S., large cities now have daily newspapers that are no longer daily because they are published only three times per week. What does that say for community newspapers?
In our industry, printing, distribution and Canada Post are very expensive and we have no access to any funding, be it government funding or not. The only source of revenue for newspapers is advertising, in an economy that is not growing at the moment.
Senator Fortin-Duplessis: Mr. Duff, do you have anything to add?
Mr. Duff: How can we monetize the Internet? How can we apply a sustainable model that can evolve over time? What is the future of a newspaper like ours? Will it still be published on paper or will it only be available online or through an iPhone app?
Since there are more and more smart phone users, different application platforms have to be developed, which is expensive. Is that how our future is going to be? We do not know.
Senator Fortin-Duplessis: Do you feel that a newspaper like yours is at a disadvantage in this day and age of instant and interactive communications, where people use the web and new media a lot more?
Ms. Craig: I would say that we are more at an advantage than a disadvantage. We are ultra local. People want to know what is going on in their communities. It is important for them to know what will happen if there is a problem in a school or somewhere else. They want to know if their municipalities will increase fees. That is what is important for the people.
I think it would be an asset for us to be visible and to compete on the web. As Jim explained earlier, employees from large daily newspapers can blog and take pictures. Every five minutes, they publish information to try to keep people interested in their site.
How can we bring people to our site when there are almost one billion websites in the world? What can we do to keep our readership? For example, will we be able to survive financially if we only have one source of funding for a website? How will we be able to pay the bills?
If that is in fact how things are going to be in the future, there will be a drastic drop in the number of people working for newspapers. We will be seeing more technical people who will be able to distribute information for large newspaper chains. It will be possible to use the information from a province or a city and send it to the whole world.
Mr. Duff: The quality of information is another concern. I see more and more that some media such as radio and TV are taking information from our newspaper. That is why we have decided to set a 24-hour timeframe for the information to be published on our site in order to prevent people from stealing our information.
We have no choice. Otherwise, on the very day our newspaper comes out, the information will be already stolen. A couple of other newspapers wait 24 hours to publish so that they can get the information from our newspaper and from other newspapers that are published on Wednesday. It is called information piracy. It is a major problem because we are losing the value of our information. Second, there is no journalistic rigour in terms of checking the source of information.
I make errors; I admit that I am not always performing at 100 per cent. But at least once a month, I see an error I made but I see it in another newspaper. I find it odd. And on the Internet, piracy is a thousand times worse.
Senator Fortin-Duplessis: This is the first time we hear a witness talk about information piracy. I am very happy to learn something new. Thank you for answering my questions.
[English]
Senator Poirier: Thank you for your presentation. I will ask you questions in English, if that is okay.
First, is it a daily or a weekly newspaper in the community?
Ms. Craig: It is a weekly newspaper, every Wednesday.
Senator Poirier: How does your newspaper receive its funding? Is it basically from advertising?
Ms. Craig: It is 100 per cent from advertising.
Senator Poirier: Do people pay to receive your newspaper?
Ms. Craig: No, they do not. It is free, unless it is out of province. We have a minimal fee for that.
Senator Poirier: If this newspaper were sold, would you have access to funding someplace? Is there a way to get funding to help?
Ms. Craig: It would be still minimal in comparison to the cost of publication. It would not be enough to survive on.
Senator Poirier: Right now, the local people are supporting you, so advertising is doing well?
Ms. Craig: It is only the advertising. Fortunately, we are in an area that is in growth. We have seen a lot of growth within the Montérégie. It is the fastest-growing segment and certainly the fastest-growing English segment of the Montérégie we are in, so it is important towards all of Quebec. We receive funding at the health and social services because of this great increase that we had in the population. The services are not available right now, so we need to give some kind of information road map for the people who have moved to that region.
Senator Poirier: The newspaper you are doing right now in the community is solely an anglophone newspaper?
Ms. Craig: It has a small part that is in French also.
Senator Poirier: Do you do a copy of that English newspaper in French for francophone people in the area, or you do not service the francophone population at all?
Ms. Craig: We do not. There are already two French newspapers in our region and those are enough.
Senator Poirier: Mr. Duff, you mentioned in your comments that because you were small it was hard to keep up with everything, to be able to offer what the people would want and be able to advertise and update your newspaper web page every day. Are you actually getting requests to have more social media from the client population you represent with your newspaper?
Mr. Duff: Yes, absolutely. We have a small, loyal following — 500 or 600 "likes" on our Facebook site. We use Facebook as a first line of information. We are posted on Facebook right away, as quickly as possible, because of the mechanism of posting on Facebook; we can open it anywhere with an iPad or any technology and post right there. We get an immediate response. It is within minutes.
With the website, it is much more complicated, and I do not have the technology — and neither does Ms. Craig — to be able to open that and do it ourselves; we need a technician to do that for us. It becomes more labour-intensive, more costly and it takes more time.
We have learned that we are better off trying to use social media to become the immediate voice that Ms. Craig was talking about. The downside of that is whether we go to something like Twitter, where you become an addict; you become addicted to Twitter both as a purveyor and a receiver of information.
That is where we do not want to go, because it will suck up all our time. We spend hours — we all do. What do you get? You might get a thousand emails a week and you have to deal with this enormous deluge of emails, 90 per cent of which you do not care about, but you still have to triage them.
It is the same thing. How do we deal with that information overload and try to keep it sustainable? That is always the question: What is sustainable?
Senator Poirier: I also noticed in your comments that were distributed to us the problems that you faced when you were asked by representatives to deal with the health and social services for the anglophones in the area. You talk about the lack of bilingual volunteers in the area.
Has that been resolved?
Ms. Craig: It is a serious problem that we have. We had to resolve it ourselves. This was a suicide hotline. In our area, just over a hundred people a year attempt suicide. I think it is up to 18 a year who actually do commit suicide within our region. Most of them are men between 45 and 55 years old.
One of the problems that I encountered sitting on this board, and when I went through the different social groups that were available, was the lack of English service. There is lack of social services in mental health care, also, for seniors with Alzheimer's. However, as far as suicide goes, the hotline was only manned by francophones. Once in a while, there would be someone bilingual who could take the call, but that could be three days between the calls.
We talked about this several times within our committee that something had to be done. Finally, the newspaper, after a year and a half of waiting for the board to do something, decided to take matters into our own hands. Mr. Duff phoned the coordinator of the suicide prevention line and said, "Do you know this service is not available 24 hours a day to anglophones?"
Mr. Duff: We tested it. We are finding that more and more of what we have to do is test the system and phone, pretending to need that service and to see if that service is available.
It is not for want of will. It is not because the authorities do not want there to be English services. However, for instance, for our area, the telephone system uses the 450 area code, which is all of the Montérégie, but it also includes the Côte-Nord and Laval. Most of the belt around Montreal is 450.
They have to figure out automatically how to sort the calls. They have this technology that allows them to route the call to here or to there, but the technology does not say whether that is an English or French caller. Therefore, you will get a suicide prevention crisis centre, for example, in Valleyfield that is mandated to receive those calls, but they will not get that call when they are on break. That call will go to Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu or somewhere like that, where there is no one on duty who speaks English.
We run into those problems all the time, and it is not because there is not a will to supply it; it is simply because they do not check their own technology to ensure it does what it is supposed to do.
We find ourselves doing that. We do ambulance survival rates, for instance. Through access to information, we have to find out why it takes 36 minutes for a 911 emergency medical call in Rigaud and 20 minutes in Vaudreuil-Dorion. Neither of those places have EMS, so those people will die. Those people's hearts will fail; they will not be defibrillated in time. They will die.
Our job is to constantly police, to sensitize the people in our region. No one else does that. The Montreal Gazette does not do that. That is not their job. That is our job. That is what a regional weekly newspaper has to do.
Senator Poirier: You go far above and beyond what a newspaper actually does.
Mr. Duff: That is what I and Ms. Craig feel to be our job.
The Chair: Are you the owners of the newspaper?
Ms. Craig: Yes.
The Chair: Are you considered a small business operation?
Ms. Craig: As far as a business and operation, it would be CONSIDERED a medium-sized business.
Senator Losier-Cool: This is her question and her question also on the advertising. It is a private thing.
[Translation]
Does the federal government use your newspaper to advertise its services?
Ms. Craig: Not regularly, I would say from time to time. It is our MP rather, it would be the office of our MP.
Senator Losier-Cool: Occasionally.
Ms. Craig: Yes, occasionally.
Senator Losier-Cool: We have already received some complaints about that.
Ms. Craig: We would not be able to live off that.
Senator Losier-Cool: Was the article in your brief prepared for the committee or is it an editorial page from your newspaper?
Ms. Craig: No, it is for the committee.
Senator Losier-Cool: Could you further explain what you mean in the second-to-last paragraph, when you question whether the government should control the web? You also say that "we only have to look at China to see what impact that has on its residents". Could you tell us what the difference is between Chinese people and Canadians who are subject to official languages and essential services legislation? What is the situation in China?
Ms. Craig: If access to information is blocked, if people are not given the right to know what is going on, if the government blocks any information from outside the country, you will not know what is happening elsewhere, you will not have the information, the news or the networks that allow you to enjoy a good life.
Senator Losier-Cool: You are talking about freedom of expression, freedom of the press and, in Canada, we are protected by the Charter.
Ms. Craig: Yes.
Senator Losier-Cool: Our freedom of expression is different from China's. In the previous paragraph, you were wondering whether the federal government should get involved in language rights and only if essential services cannot be provided. In your view, what is the difference between essential services and egalitarian services — I am not sure if that is the right word — under the Official Languages Act?
Ms. Craig: If it has to do with health, everyone has a right to the same information. Unfortunately, that is not the case in Quebec. When Bill 101 decides whether someone has the right to publish information on an English site, we have a problem. Why would English-speaking Quebecers not have access to the same information as someone who speaks French?
Our local development centre has created their site in both English and French. The site is for everyone and anyone, whether you are looking for a job or want to manage a business. As soon as they had the site in English, they got a slap on the wrist from the government because of Bill 101. That is not right. Everyone should be entitled to it. We should no longer have to be afraid because someone speaks a language other than ours. We should be able to able to publish this type of information in as many languages as possible so that every Canadian has access to it. People have to be able to understand. We should not have those fears. This does not rob anyone of anything.
Senator Losier-Cool: I completely agree with you. But you also agree that the federal government cannot enforce Bill 101.
But to answer your question on whether the federal government should get involved in language rights, the answer is yes, absolutely. It has no choice. The law says so.
Mr. Duff: We have an interesting situation in our regions. We have a growing population of anglophones or English-speaking people; people are moving from Montreal towards the west. Those cities have to deliver services in English. But officially, under Bill 101, only three municipalities in our region have a right to provide English-language services or bilingual services. Those three municipalities are Hudson, Pincourt and Île-Cadieux, with a total of 80 families. But it would be practically impossible for the other municipalities — such as Saint-Lazare with a French-speaking and English-speaking population of equal size, or Vaudreuil-Dorion, with 35 or 40 per cent English-speaking people — to reach the "English as mother tongue" level. In 1999, Bill 101 was amended not for the benefit of municipalities with 50 per cent anglophones, but for those where 50 per cent of the population has English as their mother tongue. That is a roadblock for municipalities like Vaudreuil-Dorion that want to provide services in English. And that is penalizing newspapers more and more, not only ours but all English-language newspapers in Quebec that want to publish special notices, such as the water use by-law in Vaudreuil-Dorion. Since they are not allowed to publish the notice in English on their website, they publish the information in their newspaper because they have the right to publish in English.
Ms. Craig: For example, there is going to be a municipal election soon in Saint-Lazare for a new mayor. All the publicity letting the constituents know the place and time of the election, and the names of the candidates, is done in French only, although 50 per cent of the population is English-speaking. But the legislation says that it has to be done in French and that there is no need to do it in English.
Francophones can take a lot of information for granted whereas anglophones do not get that information. We are the ones who have to tell people on our site that there will be an election, the place and time, and any other relevant information.
Senator Losier-Cool: That is a challenge for minorities across Canada.
Last week, the Minister of Canadian Heritage and Official Languages went on consultation visits about the roadmap. He has already gone to New Brunswick. Do you know if the anglophones from Quebec are going to be invited to meet with the Minister of Official Languages?
Ms. Craig: Not as far as I know.
Senator Losier-Cool: The announcement said that he would go to Quebec. But the other official language in Quebec is English.
Ms. Craig: I have no idea. We are on a number of committees.
Senator Losier-Cool: Let us hope that the media will be invited to this meeting so that they can talk about the challenges with Bill 101 at the provincial level and the Official Languages Act at the federal level.
Ms. Craig: We have to participate in those round tables. We participate in two of them, but you are telling me something new.
Senator Losier-Cool: We are going to check.
Senator Poirier: How many English-language newspapers serve the English-speaking population in Quebec?
Mr. Duff: English-language newspapers, daily and weekly —
Ms. Craig: Forty perhaps?
Mr. Duff: The Gazette and the Sherbrooke Record are the two daily newspapers, and not more than 20 or so —
Ms. Craig: I would say around 40.
Mr. Duff: Some chains own newspapers.
Senator Poirier: Approximately what percentage of the Quebec population is English-speaking?
Mr. Duff: Whose mother tongue is English?
Senator Poirier: Who use English to read the newspaper?
Mr. Duff: One million . . .
Ms. Craig: It depends on the city. In Montreal, it is about 30 per cent.
The Chair: One million speak English? What about mother tongue, half of them?
Mr. Duff: It is hard to say. I checked the 2011 census but the information has not been published yet. It is a rough estimate.
Senator Poirier: What is the total population of the province of Quebec, both anglophone and francophone?
Mr. Duff: Around seven or eight million people.
Senator Poirier: So if one million of seven million people are English-speaking, then you should have enough people to pressure your provincial officials to make sure you receive services in your own language. I am surprised that the people are not coming together to ensure they have access to information in their own language. You have one million people, after all. That is a lot of people.
Ms. Craig: They are scattered all over Quebec.
Senator Poirier: They are not in a big community.
Ms. Craig: No, they are not all together. But I would say that anglophones tend to cluster in communities, where they do their own fundraising to get the service. But it is not available for everyone. There are professions where there are not any.
A new doctor began practising in Saint-Lazare. An article appeared in our newspaper about it and, two weeks later, the day he opened his practice in February, 500 people waited four hours to get on a waiting list to consult him. It is incredible.
Senator Poirier: But no steps have ever been taken so that all these small anglophone populations meet in one place to try to be heard instead of working in small independent groups?
Take the example of the Acadians in New Brunswick. It is because they united that they managed to do and get something.
Mr. Duff: The trucking industry brought a large Sikh population to Vaudreuil-Dorion because a number of men in that community are long-haul truck drivers. All the trucking companies in Vaudreuil-Dorion were looking for experienced truck drivers and found a large network of people who were willing to immigrate here from India.
Now, I deliver the newspaper in that area on Wednesday morning with my team of carriers. I occasionally hire young Indians to deliver the newspapers, and they are paid six cents per door. They are very happy to earn that money, by the way.
The community is rapidly changing. It changes from year to year. The difference is incredible, particularly the Asians in Île-Perrot. There is not strictly speaking the idea of an English-speaking community; there are all kinds of different communities. Every day, every week, we see a new community, a new small group that looks for our newspaper, such as the Filipinos who are immigrating here. It really is an echo of Montreal, an echo of downtown, people looking for the suburban life and immigrating here.
The Chair: Do these people speak English?
Mr. Duff: Yes, they all do.
The Chair: Do they speak French, as well?
Mr. Duff: Yes.
The Chair: They speak both official languages?
Ms. Craig: Not all of them. A lot of them speak only English.
[English]
To answer your question, a lot of anglophones are afraid to speak out. They tell us that. They are afraid they will be denied access to services in health care. That is why they do not mobilize themselves. By nature, anglophones are not combative in that sense. They take matters into their hands and take care of it. They are almost ashamed in some instances.
Recently we saw — and have never before seen — a small group in a city close to us. The population is 33,000 and is called Vaudreuil-Dorion. It is very multicultural. A group of residents got together and insisted that the city give them information in English. They said, "There are enough of us here. We want to have this information and it would be important for us to have that." Before that, no one stood up to say, "We, as anglophones, want to have that information." This is new. We are going through a phase that is very new because we are in an area that is becoming predominantly more anglophone. They are moving to our area and demanding services they are used to and never had to wait for before.
It is hard to have an anglophone child with autism diagnosed in our region. It takes longer than for a French child to be diagnosed. It is not because the services are not there; it is because people who are experts in that field are not fluently bilingual. There are certain terms that you need and things you have to do to be able to give them access to that.
Sitting on this committee going through the services, one of the things I did was discover there is no gay line in our area until midnight. I thought that was very odd. At midnight it becomes another call centre and they pick up the call. We are trying to discuss this with certain church groups, to see if they can help out and redirect the calls. Again, we are trying to run a business. We are being drawn and more and more into the health care. We have people in our community coming to us and saying they need this. We need help. Do you have access for contacting these people? What can you do to help us?
[Translation]
Senator Ringuette: I understand that you need a critical mass to get advertising revenue. That is basically it. But I am intrigued by two things: how can you be successful with a weekly newspaper and have up-to-date information on a website? There is a question of timing.
[English]
You are operating a weekly paper that will condense information and publicity on a weekly agenda, whereas you are talking about your website and the community that has a sense of belonging. Even though they are not in the community anymore, they are looking at your website. Financially, I think it would be hard to put a news article on your website on Friday and for it to only be in print on the following Wednesday.
Explain that dilemma to me because I think it is a part of your looking at the cost, feasibility and sustainability as well.
[Translation]
How can you support two pieces of temporal data at the same time? How can you have a website that responds daily and have a printed issue that comes out weekly?
Ms. Craig: First, a community newspaper does not operate nine to five. It goes from eight to whenever. We never know when the day will end. There is just the newspaper and having it printed. There are also a lot of people who expect us to list upcoming activities, either for their community, their group or a merchant. So we do not count the hours anymore.
How do we do it? We do not keep the website to make money, because we are losing money on it right now. We do it to keep the readership, which is very important. In business, you need to do a lot more than before to try to keep the key clientele that is there.
Senator Ringuette: If I understand correctly, you are telling me that, without the daily information you add to your website, you might lose readers of your weekly paper.
Ms. Craig: Yes, I think so. This is what brings them to read the article. Let us say that an event took place. We put it on Facebook right away. The next day, someone will write the article, and we will publish it on our website. If it is something very important, we will publish it there. We will then feature the article again in the printed issue on Wednesday. It is one way of keeping the reader.
Between Thursday and the following Wednesday, events will naturally take place, and the reader wants to know about them. What is important for the advertiser is having readers. Our distribution is 30,000, which is a fairly sizable readership. If the advertiser does not see a return on its advertising, the advertiser will not stay with us.
So it is important for a small newspaper like ours to know what to do to keep the reader and, therefore, the advertiser. But readers come first because they are the ones that bring in the money to pay the bills.
Mr. Duff: The copy room is a luxury. Most weeklies do not have real copy rooms. They take news releases, draft news releases and publish them with a photo from the news service or the publicist. There is no checking; it is minimal.
There is always a balance. For example, there is a certain city I will not name that has had serious problems with drinking water for years. It is one of the largest cities in Quebec using only artesian wells. Ms. Craig managed to find the report by a hydrogeologist who said that within 5, 10 or 15 years, the city will not have any more water. It would be a disaster because of the size of the city. We published part of the report under the Access to Information Act. There were hearings and we followed the case to the very end. We asked the authorities questions to find out what they intended to do. Since then, the city has refused to put or publish advertisements in our newspaper. It is punishing this damned paper for publishing the truth. It is a constant danger.
Senator Ringuette: Yes, there are some governments that engage in this political exercise.
Do you subscribe to the Canadian Press?
Mr. Duff: No, because it costs too much.
Senator Ringuette: I have spoken with a lot of people in communications in New Brunswick, and they all tell me the same thing, that the services of the Canadian Press were much too expensive. Could you give us an idea of what this might mean for an organization like yours?
Mr. Duff: I worked for The Gazette and the Montreal Star. The Canadian Press accounts for one-third or one-quarter of the budget of a large daily. It is expensive, even for a newspaper like the Sherbrooke Record, and a choice has to be made. It is a small daily newspaper that sells about 12,000 copies a day.
So depending on the choice, would it be better to invest everything in a purely regional copy room where you would develop all your content yourself or would there be any interest in publishing information concerning the rest of Canada? The Hudson St. Lazare Gazette is a regional newspaper, a hyper-regional, completely regional newspaper. Plenty of other newspapers deliver content that is less regional, but not us. It is essential to be this way.
Senator Ringuette: I would like to come back to your comment about pirating journalistic articles. Do you think it would be beneficial if all federal legislation involving copyright also encompasses journalistic reports?
Ms. Craig: When the information becomes public, who does it belong to? You only need to make a small change and it belongs to everyone.
Before Mr. Duff was working with us, he was a radio host on CJAD. He was also lover of information and used it for his program.
Mr. Duff: Diffuse provenance.
Ms. Craig: I used to tell him all the time that we had worked really hard for that information. Whether it was the written press, television or radio, his colleagues, everyone did it. But the least you could do, you the champions, is to name us, to say where the information comes from. That is all we are asking. Take the information, but give us the credit because we worked hard for it.
Senator Ringuette: Exactly.
Senator Mockler: I would like to touch on two things.
First, I would like to tell you that, if you go to the Canadian Heritage website, you will see that the Harper government is launching consultations on the roadmap for linguistic duality.
Quebec City and Montreal are on the list of areas that will be consulted. I invite you to be part of the consultation group because it is important and because you represent a minority within a large and beautiful province.
Second, I am concerned about piracy. How could the government help you fight against information piracy? What do you recommend?
Mr. Duff: In Quebec, at least, we have the Press Council. I have approached them with problems a number of times. I have defended files with the Press Council. It is a guard dog, but it has little bite. It does not have disciplinary powers, but at least it can dole out reprimands and highlight the problem. Even with the Press Council, we have not managed to take on piracy or, if we want to use the proper term, "plagiarism". It is plagiarism, pure and simple.
The only thing I can do is to call up my colleagues and tell them that they stole our article.
[English]
Is it ethical for you to do that? Do you not have any shame as a journalist to steal my stuff? Oh, "diffuse provenance."
Senator Mockler: How many times have you, Mr. Duff, contacted that person or that outlet to just comment on that?
[Translation]
Mr. Duff: Constantly. Five or six times a year for 20 years. It is constant and pervasive: Radio-Canada, CBC.
I have friends who work at La Presse and at the Journal de Montréal. I have enough contacts to be able to tell them to at least put the name of our newspaper in their newspaper. The francophones do it, but the anglophones do not.
[English]
Ms. Craig: I had to phone the CBC because they were taking our things every Wednesday. Finally, I phoned the news producer and I said, "Would you mind at least giving us credit for the information you just took?" We finally reached the right person, who called me back and said that our newspaper's name will be mentioned in 10 minutes.
We do not have the time to call every single day to ask if they used our information. However, we do not have the time to call every single day to ask, "Could you use our information?"
Senator Mockler: Ms. Craig, you are touching on something we could probably look at. For example, what were CBC's reactions?
Ms. Craig: At first they were a little surprised that I was so adamant about it. I said, "No, we work hard to pay our reporters to get this information. We work hard at having the contacts to be able to have this information. We pay your salaries. We expect you to give us back the credit for the work we have done for you."
Senator Mockler: That is a very good point. I think you should pursue that in the consultation process with Mr. Moore, plus the role of what CBC should be tomorrow. There has to be a mechanism that your research is recognized and even paid for.
Mr. Duff: We can dream.
[Translation]
Senator Mockler: We cannot dream our lives, but we can live our dreams.
Ms. Craig: Yes, perhaps.
Senator Fortin-Duplessis: Do you think francophones and anglophones use the same type of material on the Internet?
Ms. Craig: If they are bilingual, yes, they can, but if they are not, how can they have access to those sites? In Quebec, I think this situation will encourage the younger generation to become bilingual. The draw of Twitter or Facebook will encourage them to learn English. I think that this is a good thing, because it will demystify the learning of English and ease their fears.
The Chair: On behalf of the committee, I would like to sincerely thank you for your presentation and for answering our questions. It was very interesting. We have learned a lot. Thank you very much and best wishes.
Ms. Craig: Thank you.
Mr. Duff: Thank you.
The Chair: I will suspend the meeting and we will resume with the next group of witnesses in a few minutes.
Honourable senators, we are resuming the meeting.
[English]
The committee is interested in hearing the points of view of anglophone organizations in the education sector on the use of the Internet and social media, and on CBC Radio-Canada's obligations. It is a pleasure to welcome our next panel: Mr. Frank Verrillo, Vice-President, and Mr. David Birnbaum, Executive Director of the Quebec English School Boards Association; and Mr. Michael Canuel, Chief Executive Officer, and Ms. Suzanne Longpré, Director of Communications and Public Relations of LEARN Quebec.
On behalf of the members of the committee, I thank you all for appearing today. You now have the floor; senators will follow with questions.
Frank Verrillo, Vice-President, Quebec English School Boards Association: Madam Chair and members of the committee, the Quebec English School Boards Association would first like to recognize and express its appreciation to the committee for its comprehensive and thoughtful report on Quebec's English-speaking communities, published last year. That particular report has certainly served to better reflect and explain our realities to governments, to bureaucracies and especially to Canadians across the country.
We are pleased to be invited to contribute to your important discussions on the use of the Internet, new media and social media in respect of Canada's language rights. The ways that Canadians communicate with and learn from each other are being reshaped by the speed and scope of new technologies. It is important to assess if, how and why this phenomenon is having a particular impact on official language minority communities.
QESBA is the voice of English public schooling in Quebec. It represents nine member school boards across the province, serving some 105,000 students in 340 elementary and high schools and adult and vocational centres. Each of those school boards is led by a council of commissioners elected by universal suffrage. It is important to remember that the English school boards in Quebec thus represent the only level of government uniquely answerable to the English educational community they serve.
QESBA has studied the terms of reference for your study and we have some brief observations to make on them. We will then look forward to the opportunity to address your specific concerns during the question period that will follow.
It is important to note that QESBA has made a very public effort to position new communications technologies as a positive opportunity for student learning and growth rather than simply a threat or obstacle. In 2008, we convened a task force, chaired by former Concordia University president Claude Lajeunesse, which produced a report entitled Towards Empowerment, Respect and Accountability: Report and Recommendations on the Impact of the Internet and Related Technologies on English Public Schools in Quebec. We would be pleased to make this report available to you at the end of our session.
The report offered a series of recommendations on responsible and informed Internet use, with a view towards employing these changing technologies to improve and expand the classroom experience of our students, all the while ensuring the responsible and secure implementation of those same technologies.
Similarly, our nine school boards, each in its own tailored fashion, have tried to respond to these new challenges and opportunities rather than resist their inevitable impact and influence. Laptops, SMART boards, tablets and even smartphones are now in the hands of students. Yes, there are complications — inappropriate use, lack of equitable access, financial constraints, and yes, even students who find themselves teaching the teachers on the finer points of the technology. Nevertheless, we are moving forward and making important progress.
David Birnbaum, Executive Director, Quebec English School Boards Association: With respect to specific minority language concerns on these issues, allow us to make four principal points, and then we will look forward to your questions.
Access to information, technology and support in English: Given that English is the lingua franca of the Internet, our minority language community in Quebec is reasonably well served in this regard. We have some occasional challenges in procuring information and support from our own Ministère de l'Education, du Loisir et du Sport and from a range of media, government and corporate sites based in Quebec, but this is not generally an insurmountable obstacle for our schools or our students.
There is a concern that we and other English-speaking representatives from Quebec have voiced in the past and will again, and it is a dynamic that we believe has a certain bearing on the issues before this committee. I am referring to the federal government's services that have devolved to Quebec, often with insufficient minority language guarantees. We are hearing about occasional problems in this area related to, for example, online information and services from Emploi-Québec. These employment and placement services are important to our students, particularly those studying in technical and vocational educational profiles.
Third, it is important to note the specific significance of Internet technologies to our schools and communities and outlying areas.
[Translation]
A strong percentage of our population lives in the regions, far from metropolitan Montreal, in areas where the population is spread out and where the schools are far away from each other.
[English]
For students at a small English school in Bonaventure, in Gaspé or Chibougamau, hooking up in real time with a teacher from Quebec City or Montreal can be the only way of getting access to a secondary 5 chemistry course, or a workshop on preventing cyberbullying. Distance learning, video conferencing and an emerging concept of virtual schooling, a topic about which I expect our colleague, Michael Canuel, will have much more to say, are some other key examples.
Finally, in a general fashion, we are always eager to see the federal government more fully exercise and support its obligations under Part VII of the Official Languages Act. In this respect, surely the federal government can do more to support the vitality and development of minority language communities in Canada. Ensuring full and equitable access to the Internet and related technologies is undoubtedly part of that job.
Michael Canuel, Chief Executive Officer, LEARN Quebec: I am the CEO of LEARN. I am here today with Suzanne Longpré, who is our Director of Communications. It is a pleasure to be here to talk to you a little bit about what LEARN is doing, especially in the world of digital and online education.
I should mention that LEARN is a non-profit educational foundation. We were created a little over seven years ago, and we have a little over 150,000 active members across English Quebec. These members include everyone from school administrators, teachers and students. We are very much touching on everyone.
Our funding, in part, comes from the Quebec-Canada Entente for Minority Language Education. However, we are also engaged in social entrepreneurship — that is to say we sell some of the services that we offer outside of our community. The money we make from these activities then goes right back, and we use it to service our community. All our services are rendered obviously at no charge to the community.
Generally speaking, what is our mandate? Our mandate is to serve the educational needs of English Quebec from K to grade 11. We serve the public school boards. As Mr. Birnbaum and Mr. Verrillo just mentioned, this includes nine school boards plus another special status school board, but we also service the private schools as well. This includes the Quebec Association of Independent Schools and the Association of Jewish Day Schools of Montreal as well. We cover the entire educational base, K to 11.
Our clientele are in the urban, rural and remote areas. We service Montreal, Quebec, Sherbrooke, the rural areas and the Eastern Townships, but we also service communities in the upper North Shore and St. Augustine. We have also even worked with students in schools up in Kuujjuaq and Jimmy Sandy. They are pretty much everywhere across the province.
LEARN is known and has a reputation for being an innovator in pedagogy and technology. We lead the way in many areas simply because we have been forced to do so over the years. Specifically, what do we do? As was alluded to before, we are very much engaged in online learning. We do this through, first, our virtual high school. As mentioned earlier by Mr. Birnbaum, we offer, for example, courses to students in high schools where the number of students in the high school does not justify the hiring, for example, of a chemistry, physics or advanced math teacher. As a result, we give these classes online. Without these services, students would not be able to get into specialized programs at the CEGEP level or certain colleges. It is an essential service that we provide to our community.
In addition to that, we offer, four nights a week, online tutorials. Students and parents are able to come online and meet in real time with a tutor. At the elementary level, it is primarily homework support. Parents come on with their children and ask questions about homework and assignments. Often parents are not up to speed with what is going on inside the curriculum. We have hired real teachers who support the parents and students there. At the high school level, in all the disciplines, we have tutors who will answer students, be it for reasons of remediation or enrichment. It could be homework. It could be preparation for exams. They come on in real time on web conferencing on our platform, and they are able to exchange with teachers. All of our teachers, of course, are certified teachers.
Those are real-time services, but we have asynchronous resources as well. That is to say, these are resources that are available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. They simply have to come on to our website. Our website is much more than a website. It is a content management system, a sophisticated, open-source database. We have over 300,000 pages of material on this particular site, including resources for educators, students, but also for parents often who want to know what is going on inside the curriculum. We offer those services to them.
For example, we have course material for students who want to know about French as a second language or English language arts. Everything inside the curriculum is on our site. Very often we find parents are on there with their children or going on their own. However, we also have many teachers who have not taught the subject before referring to our site for resources. We have a diagnostic tool that students can access 24 hours a day, seven days a week. They do a battery of tests that automatically generate a study path for them and they are able to do this at any time, wherever they are throughout the province.
We also have an online journal that is peer-reviewed, called LEARNing Landscapes. It is a unique e-journal. It is embedded with multimedia. We have had authors from all over the world write for us, from our former Prime Minister to our current Governor General, Maya Angelou and many notable educators. This has a role to bridge the gap between educational research and practice. Often, we find teachers and educators do not have the chance to keep up with what is going on in educational research. This particular journal helps to bridge that gap.
We also provide licensed content to our students and teachers. For example, they can come on and view Discovery Channel videos at any time. There are over 5,000 of them. We have a licensing agreement with the National Film Board where they can get not only the films but also many of the other educational resources that have been developed by the NFB. We also have an agreement with an organization called Media Awareness, where our students are able to find out about how to become responsible digital citizens. They learn about cyberbullying and they are able to go on to this and use the resources.
We also partner with universities, organizations and certain schools. For example, one of them is a school called Giant Steps in Montreal. They specialize in dealing with children with autism and they had a great deal of material. We are now digitizing 20, 30 years of resources they have developed and making that accessible on the Internet. We have also worked with them to help create webinars and webcasts so parents in remote areas and all over the province — very often we think it is just remote areas, but it is even on the island of Montreal — where they can talk to experts and specialists, express concerns and ask questions of those in the field of autism. That is an illustration of we do digitally.
In terms of LEARN by numbers, we do not measure our success in what our bottom line is financially since we are a non-profit organization. We look at how people use our site. Every day we get 134,000 or more hits on our site, which works out to close to 49 million visits annually. That makes us one of the leading knowledge mobilization intermediaries in Canada.
In addition to the digital work we do, we also offer workshops in real time. In the school year 2011-12, we have already given 68 workshops to 1,758 teachers. In addition to that, we also have online communities of collaboration where teachers can come on in real time or in an asynchronous fashion, come together and work on a variety of projects. In this case, we have over 4,000 teachers, educators and principals who come on to our site and work together collaboratively.
Finally, if you do a Google search, you will find just using the word "learn," normally we have the first two to three positions. It really is an indication of the fact that we feel we are getting and communicating with our organization.
The final thing to mention is that parents always ask us: What about safety and security on our site? When our students are on, we issue usernames and passwords. We are monitoring this in real time and we also have the means by which we can assure they are behaving properly, that there is no cyberbullying or inappropriate conduct.
We are connecting with our community digitally and we are proud of what we are doing. I would be happy to answer any of your questions.
[Translation]
Senator Fortin-Duplessis: Welcome to all of you. We are pleased to have you here. My questions are very short. Can you tell us what percentage of anglophone schools use new technologies?
Mr. Birnbaum: It varies. Each school board in Quebec, as is the case elsewhere in the country, is an independent public corporation managed by elected representatives. They must follow the guidelines of the program organization set out by the government, but within that, there is some leeway that, as a minority, we use as much as possible. However, it would be difficult for me to give you a percentage. For example, 18 months ago, the Premier of Quebec announced a Quebec-wide program to encourage the purchase of smart tablets and laptops for every teacher. Almost every one of our nine school boards realized then that they were already on track. Will we be able to fund purchases that are more relevant for us? We would generally be fairly far ahead in that respect.
[English]
Mr. Canuel: All schools in English Quebec have access to the Internet. As Mr. Birnbaum mentioned, the use varies from school to school. To a large extent, it depends on the leadership within the school and the community itself. More and more when you go into the regions and remote areas, we find the dependency on the use of the Internet increases significantly. It is not surprising where they do not have access to other resources. However, in principle, all schools have access to the Internet. In terms of active usage, probably 25 to 30 per cent of our schools are active and heavy users of digital content.
[Translation]
I hope that answers your question.
Senator Fortin-Duplessis: Yes. I would also like to know, since we are putting a lot of focus on minorities, if the Internet, new media and social media play a decisive role in the teaching of official languages in minority schools, second-language teaching, in fact. Could that be useful?
Mr. Birnbaum: I would tend to say that, regarding that specific question, there is not really a unique perspective for our communities. First, the emphasis we put on French-language teaching is obviously vitally important in Quebec. It is one of the curriculum priorities for each school, again with its diversity. Do electronic media play a key role in that? I am not a teacher, but I would tend to say no more than anywhere else or in the learning of other subjects.
Mr. Verrillo: As you know, we have 105,000 students in our public school system, and perhaps another 20,000 or 30,000 in the private school system, yet 140 people use the LEARN service a day. We are talking about students who visit the site often. It is just one aspect of this project and we see the use. Of course, all young people use the Internet, whether they are in school or not. Some sites are not accessible at school; it depends on the school board. For example, in our school board, students cannot access Facebook and Twitter, but at home, they have access to a school board profile on Twitter and on Facebook so they can get news.
Senator Fortin-Duplessis: The Internet is used mostly in the schools?
Mr. Verrillo: In all of the schools except some where access is limited, because they may not have the infrastructure. In small villages — this is a story I heard a few months ago — students get their parents to take them to school on Saturday because the Internet is available there, whereas at home, they do not have high-speed Internet. They have it at school, but not at home. In order to have access to high-speed Internet, they get their parents to drive them to school, and to come and get them two hours later. They go there to work on a project or perhaps to contact their friends. However, in cities, everyone has access to high-speed Internet.
Senator Fortin-Duplessis: So you have examples of young people who do not have access to high-speed Internet at home. You also mentioned the number of students that you have in all of Quebec. Are there a lot of remote villages where high-speed Internet is not available?
Mr. Canuel: There are very few. They all have access, but it may be by satellite, microwave or a direct line. The bandwidth varies from one village to another. To my knowledge, we provide service just about everywhere in Quebec. However, the bandwidth does vary. When demand is very high at some times, there may be less access to certain resources on the Internet. But generally speaking, they all have access. It all depends on the bandwidth.
Mr. Birnbaum: There was a Quebec Department of Education, Leisure and Sport program that was not exclusively aimed at official language minority communities, entitled Villages branchés du Québec, and another that supported the installation of fibre optics everywhere. The government did its share in all of this.
Suzanne Longpré, Director, Communications and Public Relations, LEARN Quebec: May I add that in certain remote villages, this Internet and high tech service allows the members of the community to stay together. Very often, when there is no grade 11 or 12 high school teacher, the young people have to leave the village. We all know that at 14, 15 or 16, you are not quite ready to do that. This technology and the courses that LEARN offers allow us to provide the necessary expertise to these students and support the community, so that our young people do not have to relocate.
Be that as it may, there is still a vast inconsistency among the regions and school boards. Our school boards have carried out action-research projects highlighting the new technologies, and there is one, called Learning with Laptops, that was developed with McGill University. The Eastern Townships school board project involved providing a laptop to each student. As you can see, there is a lot of flexibility; you can feel that there is movement.
Senator Fortin-Duplessis: I think not having to move 14- or 15-year-old students is wonderful. That is extraordinary! I think that you are doing wonderful work. I want to congratulate you, and thank you very much for having answered my questions.
Senator Losier-Cool: Are private schools more connected than public schools?
Mr. Canuel: We work a lot with the private schools. Generally speaking, there is no doubt that they are better equipped and make greater use of these technologies.
Senator Losier-Cool: LEARN is a great project.
In English-language schools in Quebec, in what grade do they start to teach French?
Mr. Verrillo: Right from kindergarten.
Senator Losier-Cool: As early as kindergarten?
Mr. Verrillo: Yes. It is different from one school board to the next. In some school boards, there are French immersion programs from kindergarten to second grade. In third grade, it can vary. Some schools have a bilingual program, 50/50, which begins in kindergarten and goes to grade six.
Senator Losier-Cool: It depends on the school boards?
Mr. Verrillo: It depends on the programs put in place by the school boards. According to their type of clientele, they may have an English program and perhaps 30 per cent French from kindergarten to grade six. It depends on the specificities of the school boards.
Ms. Longpré: I will add this because I have experience as a school principal, a very demanding job. The parents are the ones who decide on the immersion program ratios, at the steering committee.
At the school where I was principal, the parents wanted 55 per cent of the courses to be taught in French. This ratio is voted on by the parents, who must also take into account the broader frameworks that come from the Department of Education and the school board. However, the parents have a role to play in the allocation of the minutes that will be devoted to French teaching.
Senator Losier-Cool: So we have to keep the school boards!
[English]
Senator Poirier: Facebook, Twitter and smartphones all had an anglophone start. Some of the people we have met said that it has sometimes been a challenge in social media, specifically for a francophone minority in an anglophone area, to have access to all of these and understand everything because much of it is not up to speed or it is just starting to get up to speed.
Do you feel being an anglophone school board looking after our English school system in Quebec that you have been advantaged on the social media side with all of this because you are dealing with the anglophone compared to the francophone minority in other parts of the country?
Mr. Canuel: The answer is yes, absolutely. One of the realities for the English community in Quebec is that publishers will primarily focus their resources on the French community, for obvious good business reasons. That is where the business is. The majority of the population is there.
Over the years we have seen that getting resources, print material in particular, to the English community has been slower coming to us. It has changed a little bit recently, but what has happened is that the English community has had to improvise and find solutions. Obviously, going on to the Internet and using the resources there, using social media has helped. We are using what they call reverse instruction online. We use Twitter, Facebook and all of these devices to supplement and complement much of the curriculum material, simply because what comes from the publishers in Quebec is not adequate for our particular needs. It has been a real advantage for us. I can tell you we are very happy that we do have access to these resources.
Senator Poirier: You mentioned in your presentation that some schools were more remote and that where the number of students was smaller, some of the courses were offered online instead of in class. What is the success rate for students doing it online compared to in class?
Mr. Canuel: When I say this, I am never very popular, because our students always score higher than the kids in brick and mortar classes.
Senator Poirier: Online is higher?
Mr. Canuel: Yes, simply because we have the opportunity to do a variety of things. We are very engaged in best educational practice. We are committed to social constructivism in our classrooms. Our students always score higher. I say "always" because they always score higher. It goes against the conventional thinking of people who do not understanding e-learning and online education, but in fact it is dynamic and interactive. We do not believe in letting students sit in front of a computer for hours on end. On the contrary, they are involved and very much engaged. It is collaborative. Our students and teachers much prefer the virtual setting to the brick-and-mortar setting, as a rule. It goes against conventional thought.
Senator Poirier: Do you see a difference in the success rate of a student taking an online course? Is there a difference if the student does not have access to the Internet or a computer at home compared to a student who does?
Mr. Canuel: When you have the support from home, there is no question you get better results. We have seen that on many occasions. The reason for that is not just that you have a computer at home but that you normally also have the parents' support.
It is not simply the technology; as a rule, it is the parents' support and engagement that makes the difference along with the technology.
Senator Poirier: Out of the nine school districts — if I remember the number correctly — how many schools would you have in Quebec that have to use the online class compared to being in class because of a lack of number of students?
Mr. Birnbaum: The best initial answer would be that about 200 of 340 schools have fewer than 200 students. It is a creative and essential job of each school board to do its staffing plan at the beginning of any given year, and there are split classes and so on. In most cases, there are ways to make the full gamut of options pretty much available in most elementary and high schools.
Mr. Canuel: In that described scenario, we have 25 high schools across English Quebec that require our services. Incidentally, they are not all in remote areas. We have three right on the island of Montreal. James Lyng High School is one in English Montreal and there are others, as well.
Very often, because of the declining demographic or the shift from urban areas into the suburbs, we see some of the large urban high schools are big buildings with small populations and they cannot hire a physics teacher or a math teacher. We have about 25 high schools across English Quebec. We have another one in Gaspé. It is a little island off Île Bonaventure and they have 80 students in the entire school, and that is elementary and high school. They very much require our services.
Senator Poirier: You must have multiple classes and different grades in one room.
Mr. Canuel: Not online. With the online, a grade 11 physics class is strictly grade 11 physics. However, we have to offer a sufficient range of services, and the demand for that is increasing. As we see a shift away from a lot of remote areas, the schools are getting smaller and the demand is increasing.
[Translation]
Senator Ringuette: Over the past seven years, did you note an increase in the number of francophone parents seeking English-language education for their children from your school boards?
Mr. Birnbaum: Yes, and I imagine they do the same thing with LEARN. First, you have to remember that the Charter of the French Language is quite complex; there are families where there is a parent or even a grandparent who took schooling in English, and so their children are eligible to go to English schools. Often, native Quebecers are not quite aware of the limits, especially those on francophones in Quebec, because of the Charter of the French Language. We are often asked whether we can accept some young francophones. Among our 105,000 students, a large number, I must acknowledge, speak French once they get home, but study in our schools for the reasons I mentioned before.
Mr. Verrillo: I should add that 10,000 students in French-language schools have an eligibility certificate that would allow them to go to English school. We see an increasing number of young people who, when they turn 18, decide that now that they are adults, they will sign up for vocational training courses, or they want to finish their high school in English. This is not something that is spoken about very often, but the service we provide to young adults may be a service that could be further developed for this type of clientele.
Senator Ringuette: Yes, this could be young people who dropped out for whatever reason, or students who want to do what we call the GED in French.
This leads me to a question I want to put to the LEARN representatives. I must admit that I am fascinated by your description of the services you offer. Do you provide second language services to certain francophone school boards? Because there would be a certain amount of language training involved.
Mr. Canuel: The official answer is no.
Senator Ringuette: And what would the unofficial answer be?
Mr. Canuel: Insofar as it does not mean additional costs for us, we give them access to our resources without hesitation.
There is no doubt that our mandate dictates that the funds we receive are to be used to serve the anglophone community, and we cannot devote our funds and our energy to what you describe. However, if there are no additional costs involved for the organization, why not? We try to be democratic in that way.
Ms. Longpré: So there is LEARN on the anglophone side, and on the francophone side, nine years later, they set up the RÉCIT network, the network for new technologies. Certain RÉCIT centres are specialized in different things. And so we are everything to everybody, a little bit like the ADEP at the Department of Education, which acts as a type of department for anglophones, where all of the functions and services are represented. The RÉCIT's mandate is to meet the needs of the francophone population, which mandate they execute quite well, in fact.
Senator Ringuette: Concerning your distance learning programs, delivered by Internet or otherwise, have you received any comments or feedback from high schools or from the students who took these classes from your organization?
[English]
Mr. Canuel: If you go to our site, we have a video about our tutoring online, and you will see some former students who took advantage of the services we have offered.
Now I am praising our organization, but the answer is yes, we have had a lot of positive feedback over the years. We have worked for the tutorial services, because we offer a service that would normally cost parents $40 or $50 an hour.
These parents and children come online in the evenings free and they have a teacher. We hire teachers who normally work during the day in elementary or high schools. They come online and they are able to access them. Very often, teachers during the course of the day are overloaded and they have a lot to do. They can come on and get one-on-one tutorial services in real-time, using a Web conferencing platform, and interact with a tutor and get support.
The feedback we have gotten from kids who have gone on to write high school matriculation exams and gone on to CEGEP and university has been very positive and encouraging.
Senator Ringuette: That is feedback from your students. However, in regard to post-secondary education establishments, have they voiced a difference in terms of the success rate for the adaptability of that student regarding the new post-secondary institution they are in?
Mr. Canuel: We have not really gotten feedback in that context per se, no.
Senator Ringuette: I will give you my feedback. I am extremely impressed. In 45 minutes, you have shown us all the great stuff about LEARN. I have one question. What is the pitfall? Are there any dangers?
Mr. Verrillo: Can I answer that as a politician?
Senator Ringuette: You are in front of just politicians here.
Mr. Verrillo: Most of the people here are salaried employees. I am the only one that does not receive a salary. We are looking at everything in Quebec, just like I am sure you are looking at everything here in Ottawa. With something is wonderful as that, the moment you cut funding, you cut service. We are dealing with this at every school board in Quebec right now. You cannot trim more than the bone. There is nothing left.
Senator Ringuette: You are talking about funding to keep up the service.
Mr. Verrillo: The funding for LEARN comes directly from Ottawa.
Mr. Canuel: Part of it.
Mr. Verrillo: Yes.
Mr. Birnbaum: As an essential intervention for the interests of this committee, I think we would be obliged to talk about that portion of the funding that does come through the entente Quebec-Canada and to underline it. We are told not to worry, but we will keep worrying until it is absolutely clear to us that we do not have to worry. There is always a possibility in the current context, since education is provincial jurisdiction, that such agreements could become simply contribution agreements. We would want to deposit officially with this committee what a huge disaster that would spell for Quebec's English-speaking minority communities, as one example. There are many others with respect to health care and so on. With the greatest respect to our Quebec government, should those funding programs become simply contribution agreements, we are then left without meaningful federal protections that are supposed to be afforded us by the Constitution and the Official Languages Act. That would be our overall concern with respect to the maintenance of these important programs.
Senator Ringuette: Thank you.
[Translation]
Senator Fortin-Duplessis: So that means you do not receive funds directly. The funds go to the department in Quebec and then they are distributed to you, correct?
Mr. Birnbaum: There are two essential aspects to the current system. First, under the five-year agreement, which governs a rather large sum as you know, the majority of the funds, that is to say at least 75 per cent, is duly — I should point out — entrusted to the Government of Quebec to manage two school networks, the anglophone one and the francophone one.
The remaining 25 per cent — although the figures may not be quite accurate — is allocated to the program that funds LEARN, and all sorts of pedagogical aids, additional services for special needs students, all manner of programs that make access to public education equitable for the anglophone minority.
The other thing that would be jeopardized if the bilateral agreement were turned into a contribution agreement would be the consultation whereby our directors general and other stakeholders in the anglophone community are consulted on the distribution of funds. We have had and have our word to say on the percentage of funds given to LEARN — we sit on the LEARN board of directors also. As for the part of the funding that comes from the federal government, this too is subject to consultation at a certain point, and we get to have our say, as do other stakeholders in the anglophone community.
Senator Fortin-Duplessis: When we held our hearings in Quebec and had a look at what was happening in the anglophone community, we often heard English-speakers tell us that they were not certain they had received the funds they were entitled to. Have you seen anything along those lines? I see you laughing; in any case we heard this often, and our chair can attest to that.
Mr. Birnbaum: That is why I thought I would mention the consultation aspect. Insofar as we are concerned, and we speak on behalf of the elected representatives who manage all of the public education expenditures, I do not think our reply would be that we are kept out of the process. What is always difficult is to see the vast majority of funds, as I said, being allocated directly to the Government of Quebec. By the same token, where discretionary budgets are concerned, I must say that we are consulted in a fairly transparent and regular way.
Senator Losier-Cool: Bravo.
Senator Fortin-Duplessis: That is positive. Thank you very much.
Ms. Longpré: The greatest danger is having this sword of Damocles over our heads regarding the uncertainty. In education, like everywhere else, we know the number of students we will have in a few years. We know where we are going with the new technologies, and we know what tomorrow's needs will be. But not knowing how much money we will have to invest in development, in the training of our teachers, for instance, is a big contingency. The uncertainty is almost worse than not having the funds.
The Chair: If there are no other questions, I would have a brief request for clarification to put to you. Is it true that approximately 70 per cent of the English-speaking community resides in Montreal and about 30 per cent lives outside of Montreal?
Mr. Canuel: That is quite precisely the case, yes.
The Chair: And how many of the schools would be in surrounding areas, as opposed to right in Montreal?
Mr. Birnbaum: The number is probably similar to the percentages you have just quoted. It would probably be approximately 250 for Montreal.
[English]
Mr. Canuel: We actually have more off island than we do on island, because the on-island schools tend to be bigger, and we have a lot of small schools.
[Translation]
The Chair: If you have additional information on that, could you send it to our clerk?
I thank you sincerely for your presentations and also for the discussion between you and the members of the committee. It was very interesting and I would say impressive to hear about everything that is going on.
I want to congratulate you, and I thank you for having come to meet us.
Ms. Longpré: If you would like us to come back to show you our platform and how the teachers and students manage it, it would be our pleasure, it would be a pleasant afternoon.
The Chair: Thank you very much. We will conclude on those words, colleagues, and the meeting is adjourned.
(The committee adjourned.)