It's going to be important that every qualified student have the opportunity to attend university in this country. It's one of the things that makes this such a strong country.
It's true that tuition fees have increased. So have the forms of student financial assistance. There are still barriers, I acknowledge, and I want to speak to some specific barriers in a moment.
Again, it's a collective challenge for both the federal government and the provincial governments to set the policy objective to make sure that students can afford the universities they go to. There are a variety of mechanisms to achieve that.
I would like to focus on one particular group I mentioned in the last 15 seconds of my presentation. That group is aboriginal Canadians. There are 400,000 young aboriginal Canadians about to enter the workforce. Are we going to make sure that they have the skills and resources to become full members of this society? Or are we going to let this generation pass? It's particularly critical in western Canada.
There are affordable solutions to improve access to university. They include reaching back into the public schools, reaching back into the high schools. They include really innovative programs, such as at the University of Victoria, the University of Winnipeg, and the University of Saskatchewan, that make sure that once those students come to university, they succeed. What the evidence has shown is that it's not so often the financial barriers, but the other barriers. The Canada Millennium Scholarship Foundation did excellent research on this, and we're using that research to makes universities more accessible every day.