Thank you for this opportunity.
Our president, Paul Byrne, has submitted a written document. Unfortunately, he was called out of town and he's asked me to present his recommendations to the committee. What I'm going to do is just highlight the recommendations and the reasons for them, and then I can answer questions from you.
He's put it in the form of opportunities, and the first opportunity is to increase funding for infrastructure in education. The reason for this is that the demand for post-secondary education outstrips the capacity that we have in our buildings.
The new buildings that we build now are sustainable buildings in that they are built to LEED silver standards. We also require funding to upgrade existing buildings. The buildings may be functional now, but when you compare them to the current standards, you'll see that additional funding to bring those up to standard would be appreciated. We also, in some institutions, have deferred maintenance. What we need to do there is provide additional funding so that, again, those buildings can be brought up to standard if we cannot replace them.
The other priority is access to post-secondary education, and this is more from a student perspective. We know that the cost of attending a post-secondary institution can be extremely high when you take into account the tuition fees, the living, the books, the supplies, all the association fees.
We have a recommendation on this for the committee. There is a system of refundable tax credits right now for post-secondary education, but it applies only to tuition fees. If we could include the whole cost of education as a tax credit, I think that would alleviate some of the issues. Because you can't go to school with just tuition fees. You have literally hundreds or maybe thousands of dollars' worth of books and other supplies. That would be a consideration that we would like you to look into.
The final item we have is investment in technology. Sometimes location can be a barrier to education. We would suggest that we look into promoting technologies so that the student doesn't necessarily have to be on campus. Although traditionally, as years have gone by, face-to-face instruction has been very important, there may be instances where the education can be done remotely. We're recommending the committee look at technology for distance learning, maybe subsidize the purchase of computers for students, and also look into high-speed Internet access, especially in rural locations.
I thank you for this opportunity. I've really summarized Paul Byrne's presentation, so I'm open to questions afterwards and hope I can answer them.
Thank you.