Mr. Speaker, my colleague is absolutely right in the sense that we need to do everything we can to reduce the barriers to higher learning for our young Canadians. I think those were the nuts and bolts of his question. However, on how we get there I think he is suggesting that this one vehicle should make that happen.
Illiteracy is something we have to fight. Every nation in this world has to fight it. An illiterate population serves no one. Education is mainly a provincial jurisdiction but we can do some things to help that out.
I had the opportunity to meet with a first nations group in my riding just recently and was excited to hear that it had taken the Alberta curriculum and designed a program through e-learning off their reserve and connected 17 other reserves to it. The result is that their program has a 75% completion rate. I would challenge any reserve population in this country to match that stat.
It is exciting to see that some of those ideas are out there and we are looking very seriously at them. That kind of innovation will help.
More than that, in the budget we made sure that immigrants coming to this country would get through the red tape and that the barriers to the labour force would be reduced. Do members realize that there are 13 different jurisdictions, 15 different regulatory professions and 400 different regulatory bodies that an individual faces when they come into Canada to get them from there into the labour force? We set up an agency to sit down with these individuals, catch them when they come into the borders and address their needs so they can get into the labour force as soon as they possibly can and become productive Canadians.
Those are some of the specifics that are in the budget, which is why the member likely voted for the budget. I applaud him for that. He did the right thing then and he should continue to do that, and we will have a great country.