As I said, our selection and admissions process favours applicants who come from northern Ontario or from similar northern, remote, rural, indigenous and francophone backgrounds. Indigenous applicants have a boost, shall we say, in being considered.
Having said that, we don't have set-aside places for indigenous students. The reasoning for that was advice we had from indigenous people who said, “As soon as you have a quota, as soon as you have reserved seats, you create a stigma that these students are coming in through the back door or the side door.” The indigenous applicants have to compete for their place in the school and meet the same standards as all the other applicants, but we do provide them with assistance. There's an indigenous admissions stream, where potential indigenous applicants are given assistance to present themselves as best they can in their written application. Then only indigenous applicants who are called for interviews are given special training to prepare for the form of interview that we have.
It's roughly 2% of our applicant pool who are indigenous and 12% of our students, so you can see that what we do actually does make a difference, and 12% of our graduates are indigenous physicians.