Thank you. I am Tyler Charlebois. I'm the director of advocacy for the College Student Alliance, an advocacy and services organization that has proudly been representing Ontario's college students since 1967.
The alliance currently represents 16 colleges and 22 member councils, with over 109,000 full-time college and university-college students throughout the province of Ontario. CSA continues to be the strongest college-focused student organization in Canada.
Education is a life-long learning process. The future of our society depends on informed and educated citizens who, while fulfilling their own goals of personal and professional development, contribute to the social, economic, and cultural development of their community and of the country as a whole. Over the past decade, Canadians have let our investment in post-secondary education and training diminish, and now we can either sit aside and place blame or we can do the right thing, take responsibility, and start to fix that.
Provincial and territorial governments have started to take the first step toward reinvestment in post-secondary education, but financially strapped provinces and territories can only invest so much.
In 2005, the Ontario government laid out the Reaching Higher plan for post-secondary education and training. At the end of 2009-10, that will invest an additional $6.2 billion into colleges, universities, and training within the province. As a result of fifteen years of cuts and underfunding, though, you can imagine that this $6.2 billion is just going to start to lift our students' and our institutions' heads above the water. In order to make real progress in investments, the federal government needs to make post-secondary education and training a national priority once and for all.
Post-secondary education is not only about meeting the needs of learners, advancing, interpreting, and adapting knowledge, and providing an essential public service. As important as these functions are, education is also an investment, both prudent and visionary, in health and in combating poverty, crime, and unemployment. It is a major source of social cohesion and mobility, and it is essential to the development and continued prosperity of Canada and all of its regions.
The College Student Alliance would like to focus on three main priorities: a pan-Canadian accord for post-secondary education and training; through that, seeing a dedicated transfer for post-secondary education, echoing comments made by the Canadian Alliance of Student Associations and the Association of Canadian Community Colleges, echoed today by the Association of Colleges of Applied Arts and Technology of Ontario; and on the issue of accessibility and affordability of our post-secondary education and training system in Ontario.
In recent years, both the federal and provincial governments have responded to the needs of Canadians by introducing new financial and legislative initiatives aimed at improving our post-secondary education system. Unfortunately, these initiatives have often proven to be stop-gap measures at best.
Many of the problems facing our post-secondary education system are not simply a result of underfunding, but rather a lack of vision and cohesion. Various federal and provincial programs are not integrated toward a common purpose. As Canadians, we need to spend an enormous amount of time worrying about jurisdiction and how to get around it. It has become quite clear to all Canadians and students that a pan-Canadian dialogue on post-secondary education is desperately needed.
Competing for Tomorrow, the Council of the Federation's summit on post-secondary education and training, started the dialogue with stakeholders, but for accurate progress to be made in this development, the federal government must be at the table. The CSA firmly stands behind that and the development of a pan-Canadian accord on post-secondary education. We also believe that within that accord, there should be provisions acknowledging recognition of prior learning and mobility.
Regarding accessibility and affordability, we believe there needs to be a comprehensive review of the entire Canada student loans program, ensuring a focus on up-front grants to those underrepresented groups: those from the francophone community, aboriginal communities, students with disabilities, and those from low-income families.
We'd also like to have the government start a dialogue on the communication of what's going to happen to the Canada Millennium Scholarship Foundation. We firmly believe and support the Canada Millennium Scholarship Foundation. We've handed a letter out supporting that in the continuation of the millennium.
On behalf of the College Student Alliance, I'd like to thank the committee for giving us this time to present. I hope you'll take our recommendations and the recommendations of our colleagues in post-secondary education seriously and look at a real and proven investment and commitment to post-secondary education on the national stage.
Thank you.