I know Olds College, and I know its president very well. The college has shown great leadership and great imagination.
You mentioned Red Deer College, and I would say the same for it.
I'll cite another example. They have a program to train elder-care workers, and they have the seniors residence on the campus. I mean, that's brilliant.
There are all sorts of tremendous innovations. I have the greatest respect for these institutions and the people who lead them.
I would say that Alberta is among the true leaders. It's been very well resourced and financed. In other jurisdictions they haven't been so resourced or financed and have had more challenges.
I'll cite one more example. The most exciting innovation that I can remember that really touched me was on my first visit to Red River College in Manitoba. I was with the president, and there were all these semi-trailers in the parking lot. When I mentioned that I saw that they had a program in trucking, I was told, no, they didn't have a program in trucking: “Those semi-trailers, Jim, are mobile classrooms. We truck them up to northern Canada, right up into the Indian reserves, and when they unfold we have a shop.” So this instructional capacity reached out to young aboriginal people who might be interested in the various resource industries under way in northern Manitoba—hydroelectric, forestry, mining, whatever it might be. They taught those right on site.
Believe me, I'm very excited by many of the innovations. We get together and we share them and we visit. We have presidents visiting other institutions. We bring faculty leaders together, and we have training programs for them. These ideas are shared.
I'm still worried, though, about our issues of demographics and the penetration of technology. What we're doing we have to magnify. I think that's my basic point. We have some wonderful experience to share in Canada.
By the way, we're working more closely than ever with universities on the pathways opportunity, but we really have to work hard, because our challenges are big.
That's my prime message: this is really an important area, our demographics are debilitating and disastrous, and we have to manage it better.