I think most families in this country aspire to have their children go on to some form of post-secondary education, whether it be university, college, or another kind of training.
As the proportion of government funding has decreased, the principal replacement has been increased tuition fees. That's having two kinds of consequences. Remember that in Canada the principal source of assisting students is through loans. We're one of only two major industrialized countries that does not have a national needs-based grant system for funding post-secondary education students. So one of the consequences is substantial student debt. But the willingness to take on debt is also something that's socially and culturally variable.
In families that have historically been poor, are risk-averse, and don't have some experience that there's life beyond debt, the children don't even go on because of the formidable financial barrier that seems to be in front of them. We see that most strongly in the professions. You heard from the Canadian Dental Association about dentistry. In medicine there was a study at the University of Western Ontario where before tuition fees started going up dramatically, the average income of a family of a medical student was $80,000 a year in the mid-1990s. By 2002, the average income of a family of a medical student at the University of Western Ontario was reported to be $140,000 a year.
We simply can't have a situation in which family wealth rather than the individual's ability is the determinant of who goes on to get an education. We're at that stage in various ways. We need to find other ways to fund it, and we've proposed some in our finance brief. I won't go into them here for time reasons.