Those are good questions. I'll try to respond to some of them.
Indeed, it is the case that in our report we deliberately didn't focus on the amount of funding for post-secondary education, except to say that Canada has always been quite generous in the amount of funding we've had. When it comes to inputs in that sense and other senses, Canada has ranked among the top two or three in the developed world.
One of our points, of course, is that if we're spending $30 billion of public funds and $7 billion of private funds annually on post-secondary education, we need to look at more than just inputs. We need to know what our results are. What are the outcomes from all of that? That is why we focus on comparisons with other countries: whether or not they spend as much per capita or as much overall as a proportion of GDP as Canada, what they are doing, and how they are doing it differently.
We had some concerns, as you see from our report, when it came to graduate student rates of achievement, particularly at the doctorate level; concerns when it comes to the few graduates we have in science and engineering; concerns about how much we invest in research and development; but most of all, many other concerns related to the labour market shortages we're anticipating and the fact that we don't have mobility across the country of workers.
We were just talking a moment ago about foreign workers coming to Canada, and under what conditions. Yet in this country we actually have restricted mobility of workers because of non-recognition of credentials across the country. In fact, we have the absence in Canada of any system of prior learning assessment and recognition that would allow people to be mobile from one province to another. There's also the issue of credit recognition between institutions.
Our main focus, as mentioned in response to Madame Savoie a moment ago, is that beyond having objectives that are pan-Canadian, in order to compete internationally we need to have measures—the metrics you referred to—to determine whether or not we're succeeding in achieving those objectives.
What are the metrics? We've actually set out in our report many of the metrics that would be necessary. I think in fact the next stage, with respect to your question about how that could be done, is to have an agreement among all the main intervenors in the system as to whether those are the true metrics. Is that what we want to use, or should we use different metrics? This would require agreement by levels of government, by associations representing the various institutions, by employers, by workers' representatives, and others, which is how other countries have done it at a national level.
Then I think we have to have agreement about the fact that we will take account of those measures or metrics, and of the achievement, in every round of funding we take as a country, because it's a social project.
Finally, I think we need to put in place mechanisms that are quite specific about how we're going to achieve that cohesion. I mentioned, for example, a moment ago the lack of mobility provided for in Canada for workers—and for students, for that matter. What mechanisms are we going to put in place to ensure that the mobility increases among provinces and between provinces? Those things are quite achievable. I think it's just a matter of political will.
As I said, with respect to the specific metrics, I think we've set them out. Our next task at the CCL is actually to bring these people together—Statistics Canada, Human Resources Canada, and others—who could agree on a consensus set of metrics, on the data strategy we need, and be able to say, from A to X, these are the priorities in terms of data, these are the things we need to know, and here's what it's going to cost for the country to know this on an ongoing basis.
I think that's how you provide for progress.