Thank you.
First of all, let me say that the London Times supplement, which just came out, ranking universities around the world, has ranked McGill as the only Canadian university in the top 25 for many years consecutively, in fact since the ranking came out.
Second, on the quality of education, we suffer from underfunding, and I want to speak about the federal role in this regard.
One way of addressing the quality of education is through transfers. But I'd submit that the other is to pay the full cost of the research that's funded at the federal level, and that's what indirect costs are. It's a terrible name. It's opaque; it's hard to understand. What does it mean? It means that when the federal government gives a grant, they pay a full dollar for every dollar they spend. Right now, they're not doing that, and until we get to 40¢ on the dollar, we're undermining the quality of education, and we're undermining the provincial operating grant, because universities have to pay for that research somewhere, so they do it on the backs of students, whereas university research should enrich the education of students.
On post-grad and graduate students, there are discriminatory practices with respect to work permits for graduate students in the big cities in Canada. We're in a demographic deficit, not a surplus. We're trying to attract and retain people here. You could fix this and it wouldn't cost a penny, and it would mean that graduate students who come from other countries, where other countries have paid for their undergraduate education--they're not all in the developing world, far from it, and in fact the majority are not--would have a better incentive to stay here. So I think it would be a good thing to do.
We ought to also be more actively recruiting graduate students from around the world.