Thank you.
Thank you to all the witnesses for being here. It's wonderful to be back in Newfoundland after a bit of an absence.
I'll start with Dr. Whitaker. It's good to have someone from Memorial. I was doing my master's at Memorial when I lived here in the seventies.
You mentioned scholarships and fellowships, and I'll focus on that. When I was here at Memorial in the seventies, I had an NRC scholarship. It was very much enough to live comfortably on. That amount went up until 2003 and then it stopped. It has remained static. We now have the best and brightest of our country living in poverty. They are living below the poverty line. Master's students have to live on $17,000 a year. They have to pay their tuition out of that, and tuition has gone way up.
I talked to Dr. Bouchard about this. There's been a big campaign around this for the last two years. Nothing has happened. It seemed to be very low-hanging fruit for the government to keep science and research thriving in Canada, and yet we've had no action at all.
I'm wondering if you could really dive into that. I think it's only part of the problem, but it's an easy part to fix, I think.