Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I want to thank you both for coming before this committee. I come from Vancouver Island and had the good fortune to work at Malaspina University-College, where a significant number of aboriginal students were on campus, so I have had some firsthand experience in working with aboriginal students and their issues.
I will give a bit of context. When the committee decided to look at the post-secondary area, it was not that the committee didn't recognize the very serious issues in the K to 12 programs but that we were waiting for the department to report on some other issues they were looking at in the K to 12 area and we didn't want to pre-empt their study.
The other thing is that significant numbers of studies have identified barriers. One example was the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples. We've got a binder full of executive summaries on studies on barriers to post-secondary education. You've certainly listed some of them: poverty, housing, support, resources, financial recognition--I mean, the list goes on and on. Demographics--Mr. Merasty talked about the changing demographics and the fact that we're going to have significantly more young people.
I don't want to see us spending endless weeks on a study to look at barriers that have already been identified; I want to know what we need to do in a very real way to close these gaps. I know more funding is one of them, and that's one thing we have to say: there needs to be more money.
There is another issue. One of the things that prompted me to be interested in the post-secondary area was the statement you made at the outset, Mr. Matthew, around the fact that there is no legislation; it is simply policy. I was surprised to find out that post-secondary could disappear off the agenda, or be devolved to provincial governments, because there's no legislative mandate to require the federal government to be involved in post-secondary. I think that's a very real problem.
Could you talk about that? I know you can't solve this problem in five minutes.