Thank you, Mr. Chair. First, I would like to commend you on your political involvement. You were a law school student of mine at the University of Moncton. I want to congratulate you on your career in politics and for everything you have done. I wish you the best in all of your endeavours.

Honourable members, thank you for inviting me. I have not had a lot of time to prepare, so you will understand that my remarks are general. I am here today as a lawyer and law professor. I want to point out that I cannot give you a legal opinion since I am no longer a member of the bar; I will simply provide information about points of law.

I will start with something obvious that you also know: Education falls under provincial jurisdiction. The federal government's role and avenues for action are therefore limited. It cannot regulate on specific matters related to education, such as program content, exam conditions, teacher discipline or any matter directly related to education.

Looking at the scope of your mandate for the present study, I note that the concept of the education continuum, which is useful for educators and education stakeholders, goes far beyond primary and secondary education, ranging from early childhood to universities, and including continuing education and professional training. Some of those areas are protected by section 23 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, while the status of others is less clear. I will come back to that.

The federal government does nonetheless have some avenues for action. The exercise of its spending power, whose constitutional validity is undeniable in the current state of the law, enables it to provide assistance, sometimes substantial, to convince the provinces and territories to cover the full range of minority education rights guaranteed by the Constitution. Its spending power is now entrenched in the new part VII of the Official Languages Act, which imposes more specific requirements on the government as regards education in particular.

I will comment very briefly on each aspect of the study mandate.

The first component is early childhood education. Despite its importance for the development of primary and secondary education as part of the education continuum, this component has not yet been covered by section 23, as seen in the case law from the Northwest Territories Court of Appeal. The Supreme Court of Canada has never ruled on this. Francophone constitutional specialists from outside Quebec continue to argue for extending section 23 to early childhood education. The same goes for after-school programs, although the community component of federal programs for the construction of new schools does provide funding for such spaces. The arguments for extending section 23 to day care are convincing, since the concept of instruction can be interpreted broadly and liberally.

The second component is funding for primary and secondary schools. This falls squarely under section 23, bringing into play concepts that have recently been developed in the case law: the presumed insufficient number of individuals and real equivalency in the quality of the educational experience. These concepts include various elements in which the federal government could play a helpful role.

The third component is post-secondary education. While there are strong arguments for including preschool education under section 23, even if they have not yet been established by the case law, that is not the case for post-secondary education. It is unfortunate, one could say as a defender of official language minorities, because access to post-secondary education is essential for the growth and vitality of linguistic communities. In that regard, I believe the Official Languages Act provides a sufficient framework to establish an official languages in education program specifically for post-secondary institutions.

At this point, I would like to comment on something I see as an inconsistency on the part of the federal government. On the one hand, it wants to encourage post-secondary institutions, but on the other, its temporary immigration policies are reducing the number of international students at those institutions. Those reductions are also questionable—