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Potter, who is in his late 50s, is still studying seven hours a day in Edmonton at an hourly rate of $65, or $455 a day.

How this expensive story unfolds is revealed in documents obtained through an access-to-information request.

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Potter announced his decision to study French at the end of 2016, a few weeks before he left Ottawa to begin studying. His position is designated bilingual, and he wrote to colleagues: “I had to delay this training for several years to help the organization manage its transformation,” but by this point his engineering division was “on solid footing.”

His contract with the U of A’s Campus Saint-Jean, in a francophone neighbourhood of Edmonton, his hometown, is simple. Each day he spends five hours studying one-on-one with a teacher and two hours he works on his own, but with access to the teacher. The university is paid for all seven hours.

The six-month contract was for about $48,700 (plus GST) and covered levels A and B of the French-as-a-second language curriculum of the Canada School of Public Service, with standard teaching materials such as French Makes Sense and Une saison au ministère de l’Habitation.

Potter wrote to NRC president Iain Stewart after a few months that “all is going as well as I could hope,” but saying he would like a couple of extra months of study, extending his training to late August of last year. After that he wanted to come back to Ottawa.

Stewart was sympathetic. “It is a long hard slog for a unilingual person to start afresh in a new language — from your (note) it sounds like you are making progress and keeping your morale up,” he said.