In any news regarding this particular subject, there has never been reference made to the Canadian "immersion" program. If there is concrete evidence that the Canadian experience has helped, then you should be pushing more in the direction of having your efforts publicly recognised. The only information coming across about Canada is that there is a lot of trouble with getting visas-and there's too much bad news in that domain to block anything positive getting through. However, a growing number of young Russians are seeing the value of learning to converse in Estonian and making their own conclusions which are reflected in the above statistics.

If only 19% of non-Estonians are Russian, who makes up the majority 81%?
I believe that you should check your facts.

"Statistics currently indicate that only 19% of non-Estonians declare their mother tongue to be Russian." So then if the population of Estonia is 30 % non-Estonian , 19 % of them are Russian ??? i.e. 19 % of 30% is 5.7 % are Russian. What's this ? More propaganda. I think there is a typo here. More realistic would be that "19% of Estonians declare ......." Not non-Estonians.

The Estonian Central Council should clarify its statement.

All that EKN has to do is research the "Eurobarometer" opinion surveys on the internet. They would find the following on the official web site for the language survey performed this summer. I quote, " The results of this survey are compared with a number of previous Eurobarometer reports. It should be noted here, that questions have been modified and the total population varies between the studies. Thus, the trends should be interpreted with care." By the way, there were 1001 respondants to the survey. All but 2 were Estonian citizens. With another words no "halli passi" respondants. How can this reflect the true conditions under which Estonians are currently living. All the questions asked in the Eurobarometer survey(s) are available for viewing on the net . I would love to hear what the EKN has to say.