Your question is very good and it allows me to draw the standing committee's attention to one recommendation I did not speak to, but it is in our brief of course, and that is the need for additional resources in the area of infrastructure.
Back in the nineties I was the president of a very large institution in Montreal, one of the largest CEGEPs in Quebec, and when we were going through the budget cuts, it was very clear we had a very important priority. The priority was to respond to the needs of our students, to provide the services they required, and at the same time, to respond to as many special needs as possible, such as the folks of this particular committee. So we put aside money to invest in buildings and equipment and infrastructure, and that went on for pretty close to a decade.
Now that we're back into the process of reinvesting in post-secondary education, we think some of the money needs to go there, but we're pointing out in our recommendations, both here and in front of the finance committee, that not only do we need to have the investment for post-secondary education that has fallen back since 1992 from the point of view of responding to the educational needs, but we also need huge investments on infrastructure in our buildings. God forbid the day a building collapses. We see what happens when a bridge collapses. You can imagine when a school collapses, and probably there are some institutions across the country in that situation.
From the point of view of the colleges, our investment is even more significant. It's one thing to prepare a classroom for humanities. It's a classroom, it's chalk, it's paper, and it's light, but when you have to do aircraft maintenance, it's a little bit more challenging. You need an airplane and you need a number of engines, etc., and this is true for all, whether it be in forestry or in fishery. If you're teaching programs in the fishery area, you need boats and so on. So the needs of our college system are far more significant, especially in that area. As we move forward to be part of that global economy, we need to make sure we train our people à la fine pointe des besoins of the industry that they need to teach and work in, so they're able to go directly into the workforce.
The college has a double whammy: the budget cuts that have forced us to move money away from our infrastructure and maintaining our infrastructure, and then the very nature of our instruction—that because we teach skills training, we need to upgrade our equipment constantly.