I read in the paper just this morning that I have lost one of my best researchers, a professor at one of the universities in Alberta. I do not think we can retain everyone. We cannot tie people down, but I feel it is our responsibility as an organization to ensure the best possible environment.
I would like to get back to the CNFS and retaining students in our communities. The CNFS is about teaching, training and research institutions, not clinical environments. That is why we need to work very closely with Société Santé en français, hospitals and communities. With respect to the latter, we know that prevention is often the best way to keep people healthy.
We have to improve our networking and ensure that clinical placements are more competitive and more interesting than they have been up to now. Of course, as I said earlier in my very long speech, we exceeded our goal by 100%. That means that 1,400 new students enrolled and that we had about 200 clinical placements. Now we have to increase the number of clinical placements. Obviously, not all first year students do a clinical placement. Whether they do or not, our students need money. What I would like to see is summer placements happening not just in Ottawa or at Laurentian University, but also in the regions these students come from. We should make it easier for these young people to work in their home regions.
Communities are much more numerous and more spread out in the network. That makes it much more difficult to reach each one separately. That is our biggest challenge right now. It is easier to reach hospitals.
We also have to consider students' ability to move from province to province. A nurse or an occupational therapist trained in one province might want to go work in a minority language community in another province. That means we have to make sure that a nurse trained in Ottawa, for example, can have access to that kind of mobility. This is not a problem in nursing, but in occupational and physical therapy, among others, there are interprovincial restrictions. We have to deal with these constraints.
These are the kinds of issues the CNFS is focusing on. I have to say that things are going relatively well. The CNFS is not just about university rectors; it is about a group of professionals who belong to institutions and who work together every day. We are talking about hundreds of people.
Retaining professors is also becoming a challenge. Our professors want to teach, but they also want to do research, so they are trying to network. We developed a network of researchers, which makes it easier to retain professors in our institutions. The CNFS does not fund research, but it funds collaboration. I think that networking is one of the best ways to ensure that Moncton researchers stay in Moncton, Laurentian University researchers stay where they are, and Collège Saint-Jean researchers stay where they are.