Thank you very much.
First of all, I want to say it's an honour and privilege to be here today. I really want to thank Guelph's Liberal MP Frank Valeriote for putting my name forward to this committee.
I have a prepared submission, but I'd like to speak more spontaneously, because I think I do that better. Also, what I've heard this morning has been very interesting to me, and I think I can respond to it.
At Naylor-McLeod we are a small school in a small city. In some ways I've felt that what government representatives have been saying here is that we ought to be favoured in terms of their policy of shifting funding, as I understand it. We also have an incredible amount of experience. We've been doing LINC training for more than 18 years, as long as LINC has been in existence. We've always been congratulated on our efforts and we've always been very responsible in our submission of all the required paperwork to the best of my knowledge.
We are a small school, as I said. We serve approximately 90 people in Guelph. That's 80 in LINC and 10 in ELT, which is a fairly recent program and very successful. I'll talk about ELT in a minute, because that's important to what's happening here.
But even though it seems like a small number, in fact that represents about half the number of immigrants being served in Guelph by only two schools. So when we are closed, there will be only one school left, no choice for immigrants in Guelph as to what kind of school they go to.
The other school in Guelph is run by the school board. It's quite different from ours, because they are able to combine, in single classes, students from their ESL program, which is run by the school board, and LINC students. So they end up with much larger classes than we have.
We feel that our classes have a pretty much perfect teacher-to-student ratio, about 15 people per class, roughly. I can say, because I've been teaching in LINC and ESL in private language schools for 13 years in Toronto and Guelph, that this is the most successful program I've ever been involved with. We have genuinely happy people.
I'd like to say that there are real advantages in small schools like ours, because we really can honestly say we are like a family. I would like to address this issue of the impact that these cuts have on immigrants, because I can speak to you about my friends in this case, my friends in our school. I can say they are absolutely traumatized by these cuts.
We, being as responsible as possible, cannot give them a clear answer as to what their future holds. We have a pretty fairly established idea that the other school in Guelph does not have the physical capacity or seat allotment to handle their needs--at least not for a full year when the next call for proposals process goes forward, because it's already past, of course. But I won't speak to what they can do, because I don't represent that school.
What I would like to say is that coming from a small school in a small city, we have learned a lot from our immigrants. We have faced all of the usual questions about why, for example, skilled immigrants frequently give up the process of trying to settle in Canada and return to their home countries in frustration--people like doctors and nurses and other skilled professionals.
We have had cases like that in Guelph, but we've also had quite a number of success stories of people who've found meaningful employment. It's partly because we can help them more individually as a small school. We can understand their needs. We can even adjust how we teach them, because we have that flexibility. We pay attention to what they need. With our having recently gotten the contract to do the ELT program, we can do that even better by training concentrated groups of nurses, doctors, and customer service people, again with great success with a job shadow program in that case.
I want to speak about the process in Guelph as it's been playing out lately. My understanding of what's happening is that CIC has cut funding to our LINC program but has decided that ELT could continue. What they haven't understood, and what's now becoming clear, is that the ELT program will have to also stop, because it cannot be sustained without the LINC program. We simply can't run our school to service only 10 individuals.