If the question is how to keep STEM-educated students from leaving Canada, obviously one key is to have good-paying jobs in the STEM sector in Canada, and I think the government can control that only so much.
One change that has come with COVID-19 is that we've all learned to work remotely, and I think a lot of firms have now decided that you can have research teams that have people all over the world. What that means is that potentially a lot of our students who were moving, maybe, to Silicon Valley, Boston or anywhere else may end up staying in Canada and working remotely for these multinationals.
Of course, that's kind of a two-edged sword, because, if you think about our small firms that are trying to hire STEM-educated graduates, they're now competing with all these multinationals that are setting up these remote working situations. I think there has been a paradigm shift because of this shift to remote work.
Another thing has happened. I have friends who are CEOs of tech firms, and they are starting to hire. Their employees asked if they could start working remotely. They were all Canadian, and they said yes, and within six months they realized they were paying these guys three times what they would be paying someone in India, Brazil, Russia or wherever you want, so they're starting to hire from abroad now because everyone is working remotely. There has been a very strong paradigm shift here.
I'll just add one last thing. If we can keep students, graduates in STEM, in Canada for three or four years after they graduate, then I think they will probably stay long term, because, by that time, they've probably settled down and maybe they're starting to have kids. Really it's a matter of how we can keep them around for three or four years, and I think we could get creative. Right now tuition's very high. What if anyone who stays for four years gets a complete refund or a half refund of their tuition? You know, these are just crazy ideas, but....