If I may, I'd like to remind you that the federal government was directly involved. It may have been an experiment that the federal government pulled out of in the early 1990s when something called the access programs was established.
This was a partnership, or it had begun as a partnership, whereby the federal and the provincial governments in Manitoba were supporting access for aboriginal students. We've now graduated more than roughly 1,800 people through the access programs altogether, not just the ones for which the province gives money, because the federal government withdrew and the Province of Manitoba has been pouring money into access.
We also established, from the operating budget of the university, the University of Manitoba's own suite of access programs so that we don't waste any segment of humanity. In other words, we have educated students who come to us from Somalia, Central America, and north of 53°, regardless of ethnicity and ancestry. All of them come in. It's the ideal form of education for people who really require special assistance. They have instructors who know them, counsellors, and a place where they can get together. There's peer support.
I can give you some examples of this. For example, there are about 155 professional engineers of aboriginal ancestry in Canada and we've educated 55 of them. The numbers go on when you're talking about lawyers, doctors, pharmacists, occupational therapists, physiotherapists. Something like this that is dedicated for a specific purpose is an approach that we can show works. But it is labour intensive and it costs money. For some unknown reason, in the early to mid-1980s the federal government pulled out of that, and our province has been carrying the weight.
The dedicated transfer, though, is absolutely necessary, because of course the costs are high, and in order to be able to afford the instructors as well as the support staff and all of those other things that Dr. Visentin mentioned.... Microsoft owns the world. The cost of the kind of cyberspace-type education that our students demand is enormously expensive. and that's on a cycle of having to replace anywhere from three to five years.