Our target should represent the same proportion as who is in rural Canada, which is about 20% to 30%, depending upon how you define rural Canada.
There are a lot of barriers. One of them is that fewer rural kids go to university, to start with. All those who go to university have already spent a lot of money coming from the outside. If you come from another part of Newfoundland, you have to pay more to go to university in St. John's than if you were from St. John's. Rural families are poorer than urban families, so again they are at a financial disadvantage. This is why rural access scholarships would help to allay that disadvantage. Students coming into medical school now are very concerned about the high cost of medical education, and that is a barrier.
In the medical schools, we're doing a lot of things to try to increase the rural enrolment. In fact, at Memorial University, 40% of our students come from rural areas, because we have a very defined program to encourage them. But that's not the case across Canada.
This needs a Canada-wide approach. That's why two of our recommendations are to have a chair for rural medical education at each medical school, to maintain a focus and be a champion for all aspects of our medical education; the other one is to put a chair of rural health research in every medical school across Canada to maintain that focus.
If I might pick up on what Mr. Lessard said about why we do not focus—