Thank you.
Welcome to the witnesses.
I need to start with you, Ms. Yetman.
Thank you for your comments; it's really nice to hear the positive. I quite agree with you that the attention on teachers is incredibly important. I thank you again for the link to food insecurity and the importance of the school lunch program.
In my province, in conversations that I'm having within the community, there is tremendous support for this and for the need to ensure that we have a cultural lens on how we present the program so that rural communities are very much part of this program and it doesn't just end up in urban areas—which is clearly where we've had more strength in programs in the past—but is about every child. I look forward to working through that going forward.
Even though my children are outside of the school system now, the shortages of teachers have been coming for quite a period of time. There's no doubt that rural communities see this more intensely than urban areas. There was the pandemic with the challenges of switching to remote learning, although I do think that what happened was phenomenal. Educators stepped up and really did so much to try to ensure that the children moved forward in their educations.
We saw a significant number of senior educators leave, which has just exacerbated the problem. Again, to your point, loan forgiveness is a really helpful way to encourage young educators to move to rural areas and begin to address the challenge. Would you comment on that and what you're hearing from teachers across the country?
Certainly, please give any additional comments you have on this and what we need to do moving forward to ensure that we really mitigate the shortage as much as we possibly can in the short term and build strengths going forward, so we don't end up in this place again.