Before I begin, I will just point out that I grew up in a family in which my father was an engineer, and he was gravely disappointed that I let down the family by becoming a professor.
In any case, the challenge I described in the presentation is a very serious one. A study done at Carleton University several years ago, for example, showed that more than half of all undergraduate courses at that time were being taught by non-tenured people on contract, with low pay and so forth. That's largely a result not of some desire of university administrations to emulate the model of the Hudson Bay Company or other retail sectors, in which the majority, if not the overwhelming majority, of employees are part-time; rather, it's a response to underfunding.
With university budgets not able to meet the growing need in terms of growing enrolment and the need for more sophisticated lab equipment and larger library collections, the way they're coping is with a human resources policy that relies less and less on full-time faculty. And the consequences are quite grave.
The solution we see to this is to lobby aggressively with all of you for more adequate funding, as I mentioned in the presentation. We think that going to the standard of one-half of one penny for every dollar generated by the Canadian economy as a worthwhile goal for the funding of post-secondary education by the federal government is a key part of the answer to that.