Question Period Note: French Immersion

On April 19, 2021, the Government of Canada introduced its Budget 2021: A Recovery Plan for Jobs, Growth and Resilience. It includes an investment of $389.9 million over three years to support official languages at Canadian Heritage. This represents a significant increase in the funding available to support French as a second language training programs, including French Immersion, over the next three years.

• Access to quality education in both official languages is a right in Canada. We need to act now to protect the French language and ensure substantive equality of our two official languages.
• Our Government is proud to be investing $180.4 million to help Canadian students achieve higher levels of bilingualism.
• We will continue our work with the provinces and territories to help them meet the strong demand for spaces in French immersion and French second-language programs.

• On April 19, 2021, the Government of Canada introduced its Budget 2021: A Recovery Plan for Jobs, Growth and Resilience. The Government is investing $389.9 million over three years, beginning this fiscal year, to support official languages.
• This budget funding has now been allocated and provides:
o $180.4 million to Canadian Heritage to help students across the country achieve higher levels of bilingualism. This funding will serve to enhance French immersion and French second-language programs in schools and post-secondary institutions, to help provinces and territories meet the strong demand from students and parents for French immersion and French second-language spaces, to strengthen the existing strategy for the recruitment and retention of teachers, and to support the learning of French from early childhood.
o $121.3 million to Canadian Heritage to provide high-quality post-secondary education in the minority-language in Canada.
o $81.8 million for infrastructure projects serving official language minority communities across Canada.
• For the Government of Canada, being able to offer Canadians the opportunity to learn their second official language represents equality of opportunity and realizing the vision of a bilingual Canada.
• In March 2021, the Minister of Economic Development and Official Languages announced a number of initiatives to address the shortage of teachers in French-language minority schools, as well as French immersion and French second-language programs across the country. The new funds from Budget 2021 will also help address this gap.
• In February 2021, the Official Languages Act reform document, entitled English and French: Towards Substantive Equality of Official Languages in Canada, affirmed the desire to provide opportunities to learn both official languages, as "the demand for access to French immersion programs has clearly exceeded supply in recent years, [and] year after year, parents show their enthusiasm by enrolling their children in French immersion schools despite the lack of spaces in the school system."
• The Protocol for Agreements for Minority-Language Education and Second-Language Instruction 2019-2023 between the Government of Canada and the provinces and territories is a multilateral framework which sets out the broad parameters for cooperation between the two levels of government in the area of official languages in education, and provides a mechanism by which the Government of Canada contributes to the costs incurred by the provinces and territories for minority language and second language education. Under the parameters of the Protocol, each province and territory must negotiate a bilateral agreement tailored to its priorities in order to obtain federal funding. Although it subscribes to the general principles of the Protocol, the Government of Quebec is not a signatory.
• Under the bilateral education agreements, the Government of Canada provides $235.5 million per year to the provinces and territories ($149.1 million for minority-language education and $86.4 million for second-language instruction). An additional $15 million per year, announced in Budget 2019, is set aside from 2019-2020 to 2022-2023 to increase support for minority-language education. This additional support is contingent on commitments from provinces and territories to improve stakeholder consultation and transparency in accountability. Canadian Heritage is exploring delivery options for the French second-language funding and is consulting with provinces and territories to determine an equitable distribution across jurisdictions, via the bilateral education agreements and action plans.

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