Thank you very much for your question.
There are several possible answers to that. I was involved personally in lobbying for the Canada Health Act, so I have some familiarity with how that works. You're right that there were problems in what happened under the Martin government in particular and the establishment of the CHST. But we're trying to say here--and we've seen it in other areas such as social programming--that if we don't have dedicated transfers, it's even easier for the federal government to move to cut back on funding for whatever reason.
We're saying collectively that post-secondary education is just too important at this point not to have dedicated funding and national legislation to go with that. Part of that--as you have suggested and the three people here have recommended--is the importance in this region of per student allocation, given the number of people we're dealing with here and the number of people coming in. So if there is to be dedicated funding, it should be done on the basis of per student allocation. That would certainly assist universities and students in this region.
It's a matter of establishing legislation and then developing the funding mechanism to go with it, which we've done in health care and can continue to do.