Thank you for your question, and thank you for your sympathetic response.
First of all, I just want to correct the perception, really, that while there is a recognition that colleges are in the provincial domain because of education and post-secondary education...I'd also like to remind the committee that so is health in the provincial domain, so are municipalities in the provincial domain, and so are many of the universities in the provincial domain, and we find no difficulty in finding ways to help them. So I would suggest that we should probably look now. I think our time has come from the point of view of the community colleges.
We talked about the dedicated post-secondary transfer. Within our brief there are an awful lot of areas where we could work collaboratively with the federal government--and we are looking at ways to do that. In our brief we single out two in particular: one, the need to have up-to-date modern equipment--and it's very expensive to do that. Just take a dental hygiene lab; it's a huge expense. It replicates not just one dentist's office but probably 30 dentists' offices in one particular teaching station. So it is expensive, and we do need help, and I think it is beyond some of the provinces to be able to do that.
The other area is in the area of research. I think we've come forward and we've dedicated and proven our abilities in those areas, and it is important now for us to have something that is specific for colleges, working closely with industry partners, small and medium-sized businesses, and contributing to the economic development of the community. So for us, at this point what we're talking about is in the area of equipment and in the area of applied nature of research.