Thank you very much. There were a lot of questions there.
First, you were talking about the tools. The association and its 150 institutions are operative right now in probably 75 countries around the world, because the rest of the world has really realized what Canada probably is just now starting to realize, that its college system is very crucial to developing that skilled workforce that's not just the elite but addressing all the rest of Canada.
One of the hardest to explain things when you're in other countries is that there is no national ministry of education. I'm not standing here in front of a federal parliamentary committee to suggest that we have a national ministry of education, but that's part of the difficulty we have, because as a result of that we have 13 jurisdictions all trying to work in some sort of common denominator. When you have 13 jurisdictions working in common denominators, you sometimes tend to lead towards the lowest common denominator.
So what I think we really have to look at is ways in which both the federal government and the provincial governments can put aside some of these jurisdictional debates. That's why we think one of the vehicles is pan-Canadian workforce development, if we can start to look at ways in which we can set down some shared common goals that we'd like to try to achieve.
Some of the agreements that exist between the provinces and the federal government around the labour agreements have started to set some of those down, and that's encouraging to see. Some of those started with the Liberals and are being continued by the Conservative Party. So we're encouraged by seeing some of those events.
Literacy is an integral part of that pan-Canadian workforce strategy. In fact, our suggestion for a pan-Canadian workforce strategy is one that's more the notion of a suite that enables us to set the priorities, provide the resources, and target the accountabilities to take into account each of the regions of Canada as such.