Thank you, Mr. Pallister.
I must begin by expressing our admiration for the stamina of this committee, given the number of witnesses you have to hear over many days, so we're grateful even for our five minutes.
I have one message for you, but before giving that message, I want to ask you this. How many of you have said to your constituents or in a speech that the future of Canada depends on how educated a population, how educated a workforce we have? Some have said it used to be that the resources were under our feet and now the resources are between our ears. This is expressed in a variety of ways, but it's a message that almost every elected parliamentarian in this country has expressed in one way or another.
My message for you today is that your desire and our desire will not be realized without a significant increase in federal funding leadership for post-secondary education. That's the key message. Before the early 1950s, funding was exclusively a provincial responsibility. The Massey commission was appointed and reported in 1951, and following that, the federal government began to play an increasingly significant role in funding post-secondary education. It was only after the federal government came to play that role that we began to have the national system of post-secondary education of which we're so proud today. It has put Canada on the map internationally for having one of the best post-secondary educational systems.
That system has come to be in increasing jeopardy as the federal government has cut back on its support for post-secondary education over the last decade or so. Measured in constant-dollar terms, per full-time equivalent student, federal funding for post-secondary education has fallen 20% between 1989 and 2004. It's not just an issue of the amount of funding, but how it's delivered. Right now there is no transparency in how federal funds for post-secondary education are spent, if they are spent at all in post-secondary education. Surely federal dollars intended for post-secondary education should end up supporting our universities and colleges and not be used to build roads, pay down provincial debt, or cut provincial corporate taxes. That's why we propose in our brief the creation of a separate funding envelope for post-secondary education, governed by a Canada post-secondary education act that would set out pan-Canadian guidelines and objectives.
We believe that a new federal post-secondary education fund should be based on gross domestic product--that is, the wealth created in our economy--rather than a fixed dollar amount. The target that we recommended, and it's a target that Canada achieved in the late seventies and early eighties, is one-half of 1% of GDP, or in other words, one-half of one penny for each dollar created by the Canadian economy. Surely as a society we can afford to spend one-half of one penny of every dollar created by our economy.
On reaching that target, a target we reached in the late seventies and early eighties would require an additional $4 billion in federal expenditures. That's a huge amount of money, but when we saw a few days ago that the federal government was able to write a cheque for $13 billion to reduce the debt and to spend billions on the military, given the economic, social, and cultural benefits that Canadians achieve and the importance that each of you has described in your own speeches to have an educated workforce, meeting that objective is clearly within our means.
We just want to raise two other issues with you relating to post-secondary education, and one is the issue of access. A growing problem with the reduction in federal support for post-secondary education has been skyrocketing tuition fees. Universities and colleges are left with the dilemma of how they're going to be able to afford to continue their operations, and they have had to shift more of the burden on to the students through increased tuition fees. The dilemma has been a dramatic increase in student debt. Canada now has one of the highest levels of student debt of any industrialized country, and that's having an effect on who goes to university and college. We believe that what determines who goes should be the ability of the student, not the wealth of the student's family. That can be dealt with by the federal government shifting its priorities to reduce those barriers by transferring money that it puts into the Canada millennium scholarship fund--and in the future, the registered education savings plan and the Canada learning bond--into needs-based grants so that ability, not family wealth, is the determinant.
The final issue is research. I think all of you would agree that there's a desperate need to build the research capacity in Canada. Most of the research that turns out to be commercially relevant doesn't begin as commercialized research, it begins as basic research. Anybody in any of the applied disciplines, in engineering, chemistry, mathematics, physics--if you talk with industrial people like Mike Lazaridis from Research in Motion--will tell you that most of what's been important for them commercially, and what pays off in the long run, comes out of basic research.
You've significantly increased research funding, but much of it has been pushed towards commercialized ventures that is starving basic research funding. The hardest hit, in fact, is the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. More than half of the students and faculty in this country teach in the social sciences and humanities, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council receives a much smaller share of funding than does NSERC or CIHR.
So the larger issue of the total amount and its balance is a key priority as well.
Thank you very much.