Absolutely.
In the early 1990s, we saw a major cut to the Canada social transfer from which Canadian post-secondary just has never recovered. There's been a steady decline in public funding as a share of total revenue for universities and colleges since then, and as I said earlier, the difference is being made up predominantly by tuition fees and increasingly by international student tuition fees.
Last year we issued a report, which I am happy to share with the committee, on the affordability of post-secondary education. It did find that tuition fees over that same period have well outpaced increases in both housing and food. Housing, notably, has also well outpaced the cost of inflation, so that's telling.
Really, what we've been advocating for on the graduate student scholarships point of things is we would like to see the awards increased by $185 million in 2023 and then by an additional $55 million per year ongoing to increase both the value and the amount total of awards.
We do also support our science requests around indexing those awards to inflation to make sure that we are at least addressing and capturing inflation moving forward.